Travelers to northern Sumatra can't avoid running across bika Ambon, flattish baked cakes made of tapioca flour, eggs, pandan-infused coconut milk, and sugar, traditionally leavened with palm wine (yeast is a more commonly used today). Bika Ambon are a specialty of Medan; a quick google turns up plenty of stores in the city specializing in plain and new-fangled, fancy versions of the sweet.
Less common, it seems, is the Mingkabau version of the cake, bika Minang. The couple operating this mobile bika bakery parked outside of Padang's central market hail, fittingly enough, from Bukittingi, a city in the heart of western Sumatra's Minangkabau region.
Bika Minang start as a thickish batter of rice flour, white sugar, eggs, coconut milk, and a leavening agent - yeast, probably, in this case. They're baked in round metal molds lined with heart-shaped daun waru, the leaves of the sea hibiscus plant (Hibiscus tiliaceus L.).
After the batter is mixed it's allowed to settle for a few hours before being ladeled into the molds,
which are then placed on a baking sheet and popped straightaway into a hot oven.
After five to seven minutes (during which the trays are repositioned left to right and front to back) the bika emerge puffy and browned.
Unlike spongy bika Ambon, the Minang version is cakey, with an agreeably light crumb. Its dry, crackly exterior complements a moist but not gluey interior. Eggs don't figure much into this bika's flavor, which is deliciously, intensely coconuty. Reminiscent of tea cakes, not-too-sweet bika Minang strike me as - notwithstanding the predominance of coconut in the taste profile - a distinctly 'un-southeast Asian' sort of sweet snack.
At a weekly village market a couple hours north of Padang we ran into yet another bika, bika beras (beras=uncooked rice).
These rice flour and gula merah (palm sugar) cakes seemed not to be leavened at all.
Dry, heavy, and compact, with not much flavor to speak of, they left us wishing for bika Minang.
Look for fresh-baked bika Minang outside Padang's Pasar Raya (the central market) on Jalan Mohammed Yamin, west of the junction with Jalan Imam Bonjol. You can also find (a somewhat inferior version of) them inside on the lower level of the Bukittingi market.









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