Make your own birthday cake

Today is an exception. Not about the street food, not about the stories from the past, or my bike riding adventures but about the challenge in my day. Tomorrow is my birthday. So I challenge myself to make my own cake for my day. I love baking, I probably got it from my mom, she loved to make cakes in the old times, but she has never been a good baker, for her making cake was just a "not serious" hobby. I'm surely better than my mom as there was time I was thinking to apply for Cordon Bleu to be a real "patissiere" - a pastry chef!

                          Polish cream cheese coffee cake, buttery, filled with cream cheese...

A cake from the childhood (bánh phục linh)

Everyone always has some favourite things in childhood, that could be either a toy, a book, a character or even a cake that we used to love and desperately wanted to have. As far as I remember I had a plastic sword from what I never  separated after school, a picture book that I always slept with ...and a small cake that I still remember until now - bánh phục linh. I tried to find why we name this cake like this? and what does it mean - phục linh? The cake made of tapioca starch, so may be that the way we call the starch in "chinese"? anyway I really don't know how people comes up with this name, where it comes from?

                 Bánh phục linh - tapioca cake, the green comes from pandan leaves... 

When the writer runs a restaurant...

It's like a trend everywhere else in the world when you got a fame, you will definitely try your luck again in another field. How many celebrities launch the coffee shops, the restaurants, the fashion brand but not everyone get really what they want: some flourish, some fail.
Exactly the same in Vietnam, we heard about the fancy places owned by some "diva" or "supermodel", or another spots - more traditional - by famous designer or novelist. I wonder - is it another way for them to make money or just to agree with what they said: "I open this place to hang out with my friends, I don't need to go out...". Hmm, it would be true or may be not!

I'm talking about "Đo Đo" eatery created by a popular novelist - Nguyễn Nhật Ánh, with his wife. To be honest I know very little about this writer, he seems well-known among the youth, some of his works has been adopted for TV series. It sounds great, but is it great his place? I got different comments: "it's so so", "mostly for those who love central flavours" (this place specialised in dishes from Central Vietnam), "the place is so tiny, not comfortable", "the dish is a bit salty"... I won't make any comments until I visited the place with friends few days ago.

Bread stall since 1950s in Saigon

We talk a lot about our bread, we know how it's popular, how people prefer it, our bread has been even selected as one of the best street foods in Asia, but we may not know that somewhere in Saigon we still have a place where they serve bread in another way since 1950s.

I was told about this place quite sometime ago, I keep in my mind "I should go there" but by somehow only last week I've been there for the first time. It's not far from my old parents house and the stall was there probably long before 1975. It's an old stall right at the corner near to Cao Thang and Nguyen Dinh Chieu's intersection - with a faded signboard "Bánh mỳ Hòa Mã"

It's not take-away shop as other places, they have tiny old metallic chairs, small, low tables along the passageway. If more customers they put more chairs and tables, if not they clear them up, not to disturb the traffic in this alley.

                  A plate of the variety of cold ham, sausage, homemade mayonnaise and pâté.

Beef noodles at "Tương Lai" - will it help to find a lost friend?

Two years ago, I have posted a small notice on BBC's Facebook page in Russian to look for a long-lost friend. He was from Belarus and the last thing I heard about him was...exactly 26 years ago. In his last letter, of course, it was not an email, he briefly informed "I will be moving to Spain for my journalist's career...". That was all I knew. Two weeks later, after my note posted on BBC's wall, I got a message from a Russian girl, who is living in Moscow and willing to help me. To my great great surprise, with her help I found my old friend. This time I got from him an email...

                Where my friend treated me to a good "phở" before I left Vietnam. It was already three decades...