Is it really the same?…

Well, no, not really.

In an old recipe book that I bought for my missus a long long time ago, they call it “Chinese sponge cake“…

I think we call it kay nerng kor here or egg cake, the same name that we use to call these…

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…but even if basically the ingredients are the same, the one that we called lung ngor in Foochow, is baked in an oven and the other is steamed.

The Malays have their kuih bahulu…

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…but I do not know if they are baked in an electric oven now as well or they still use the traditional brass molds and bake the cake over burning hot charcoal. I remember in the old days they came in various designs and I particularly remember the one in the shape of a fish.

Then there is this variation of the steamed egg cake or kay nerng kor – what we call bak koi or meat cake…

My aunt in Kuching, or my maternal uncle’s wife, to be exact, makes the nicest bak koi…

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…but she is in Kuching and I am here in Sibu so I will only get to enjoy hers when I go over…or sometimes, she will send to me when there is somebody coming over here.

What makes this different from the usual plain steamed kay nerng kor would be the minced meat in the middle and the fried shallots on top…

…but of course, the ones that my aunt makes would be far nicer, very very far as she would be so much more generous with those two added ingredients.

Well, I guess beggars can’t be choosers so I will just have to be happy with the one I can get here (2.316156, 111.840448) at the fruit & vegetable shop along Jalan Ruby, sharing a shop lot with a hair salon at the other end of the block where Kim Won Chinese Medical Store is, where I buy those nice Sarikei Nestum-coated with peanut butter filling mochi. A quarter of the whole thing like this…

…is selling for RM5.50 each and though it may not be THE best, I would say it is pretty nice.