Published:  10:35 Friday - April 06, 2012

Khot (khọt) cake is a very popular dish in southern Vietnam. The cake is easy to cook and suitable for the taste of many people, usually made for desert or treating guests.

Formerly, the main ingredients of khot cake were rice powder and well-grinded pork.The cake was served with flavour sauce, snack vegetable and cucumber. After that, people have made changes on the recipe creating the special features of the cake in different places.

People in the West usually mix rice powder with saffron and put more fresh shrimps when putting in the pattern. In the Centre, khot cake is served with cucumber, thin-sliced young papaya, big egg-plant…which are all soaked in weak shrimp sauce. In the North, people just use rice powder, some eggs (to make the powder more soft-rise) and dry shrimps instead of fresh ones...

In the khot cake making process, powder making is the most important. Chosen rice must be good to generate the cake powder. The ingredients of cake powder are wet grinded rice, steamed rice and grinded solid cool rice noodle. The different parts of powder are mixed mainly according to the makers’ experience. In the next step, powder is steadily stired with the water, little vinegar, coconut juice; there may be more eggs to increase cake softy or more saffron to make the cake having attractive color. The cake is treated with spice, salt, sugar, glutamate, small sliced onion... People usually use pork or shrimp, small shrimp, crab which are minced well then sauteed to make the cake filling.

They put the circle pattern in the pan, coat the pattern with hot fat, pour powder in the pattern, put the filling into the centre  then cover waiting until done to take out. After being done, cake powder becomes opaque yellow, the filling is brown-red, onion and chives which are in the fat stick to the cake making the green color.

There are also sauce and raw vegetable to be served with khot cake. Raw vegetables usually includes mint leaves, lettuce and cucumber... and the sauce can be flavour sauce or salted fish with garlic,lemon juice... depending on regions.