In recent years, every Mid-Autumn Festival, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thuy Duong has come up with ideas to create unique cake designs, not "in touch" with anyone. This year's moon season, she decided to bring the image of an ancient three-room house of a Northern village into the moon cake design.
"Once a year, my colleagues and I will come up with ideas to design many unique cake designs, helping traditional Vietnamese moon cakes have more new colors" - Ms. Duong shared.
The baker said that, having been born in a Northern village, images such as the red tile roof, three-room house, and brick yard were deeply imprinted in her memory. This is part of the reason that prompted her to recreate these images in this year's cake design.
In addition, she also consulted and drew inspiration from miniature Vietnamese village landscape models to make her work more lively.
Ms. Duong's work is centered on a three-compartment ancient house, with an old tile roof above, and in front is a brick yard, water jar, and many other details.
Regarding ingredients, Ms. Duong still uses familiar baking powder, water, green bean filling and food coloring. But instead of using yellow sugar water like traditional pie crust, she replaced it with white sugar water to easily color.
The details on the cake, even the smallest, are all hand-shaped by Ms. Duong and her colleagues so that the work has the most "soul" and authenticity.
For Ms. Duong, the most difficult and time-consuming step is shaping and coloring the cake. If the craftsman does not create details of the desired size and shape, the overall proportions of the model will be wrong.
During the baking process, Ms. Duong also encountered cracks and broken cakes many times, forcing her to find ways to fix them, even replace them completely. Going through many stages, after 5 days, the work with a weight of about 30kg was completed and presented to the public.
“I had to have the contribution of 3 friends to complete the cake. I hope that more and more tourists and people across the country will be able to admire this work. Especially people far from home can see the same childhood images as me" - Ms. Duong said.
