- I'm tired now.

- It is tiring.

- I'm gonna need this massage when I'm done.

I'm Chef Yia Vang, in my restaurants, I share my family's Hmong heritage through the food we serve.

Every bite tells a story and the most memorable meals not only reflect who we are, they connect us.

From field to table, mill to market, let's explore food from around the world and relish the cuisines and cultures of our neighbors.

(cheery jazz music) The best desserts take you someplace special, transporting you with every bite.

Today I'm sampling two very different cakes, each with surprising histories and a whole lot of flavor.

- Hey Yia.

- Hey Chef Marc, how are you?

- Good.

- Dude, sitting out here eating pastries, makes me feel like I've been to France.

- Well, I'm glad you have that feeling because that's the experience we want to give to our guests.

Come and have a seat and we'll bring you a croissant and a drink.

- Speaking of croissants, like what are some of your favorite pastries to bake?

- First ever that I had in my life was the King's Cake.

- Okay.

- And the funny thing is, it's also the cake that I got started with when I started this business.

- You think you could show me how to make that today?

- Sure, you have time?

- Yeah, for sure.

- It takes three days so... - Oh hey, I got three days.

- Okay alright, let's go.

- Let's go man.

(groovy French music) Meet Chef Marc Heu, French Pastry Chef and James Beard Semi-Finalist, whose favorite childhood dessert is full of surprises.

- So King's Cakes has two components, the crust, so originally it's puff pastry, and then the cream on the inside, it's originally made of almond.

So today we're doing an almond cream, but the crust, we're gonna be using a croissant dough.

- Croissant.

- Croissant.

- Croissant?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- So croissant dough has the yeast, so it's more crispy, more chewy, versus the puff pastry is just very crispy.

So first step, I mean, we just have to combine everything.

Very important is to not have the yeast touch the sugar or the salt because it kind of like burns it so make it not activated.

- It smells like beer brewing, brewery.

- Yeah.

- Brewery.

- Yeah, yeah.

(jazzy french music) Honey use as a preservative and it add a little taste to it, obviously.

And then milk just gotta mix it for about 10 minutes.

- Great.

Like we're 100% Hmong but you know, your family ended up in France and my family coming here to America, you have a very different story than I do.

- Laos was partially colonized by French people, and my dad had a chance to learn a little bit of French.

So when it was time to leave the country, he had a choice between the US or France.

And probably thought it, "Oh because I speak a little bit of the language, I might have a better chance to have a better life for my family."

So that's how we ended up in France.

(tape rewinding) (intriguing music) - [Yia] In the middle of the Vietnam War, the United States conducted a covert operation known as The Secret War.

The CIA recruited Hmong soldiers in Laos to stop the spread of communism further into Southeast Asia.

Tens of thousands were killed and many Hmong families had to flee the country, after the US pulled out of the war.

They stayed in Thai refugee camps before immigrating onward.

Over the next several decades, more than 200,000 Hmong refugees, including my family, made their way to the United States.

But others, like Marc's family, ended up in France and other countries.

- I was born in France in a town called Saint-Remy.

At the age of three, my family moved to French Guiana.

He heard about a small community, Hmong people in South America that were still living under the French government.

So like people are living just like back in Laos, like farming.

And yeah, we had no say.

- Yeah, I was gonna say, did you have a choice in that?

- No I just woke up, I was three years old, I woke up and it was a pitch dark, yeah in the jungle.

(crickets chirping) (pans clinking) So what you want to do from here, it's to knead it.

The first memory of joy that I have in this life would be the King's Cake, because it's the first cake that I have memory of eating it.

And for French people, the King's Cake is a very special.

It started as a religious tradition, the day to eat the King's Cake is January 6th, right?

And it goes through the whole month of January.

And I remember the first King's Cake, I mean, we read the back like, "Oh, be mindful there is a little trinket."

We call it fève, on the inside of the cake.

And usually it's in the shape of one of the character of the Bible.

I mean, because that's how it started but now, nowadays, I mean it can be anything.

- Wait hold on, there's a trinket inside of the cake.

- Yes.

- [Yia] King Cakes have been around for ages.

The pagans baked ones for Saturnalia, an ancient Roman festival honoring the god of time.

By the Middle Ages, Christians had adopted the tradition to celebrate Epiphany when The Three Kings were said to have delivered gifts to baby Jesus.

Today countries around the world bake different versions of this dessert.

- Yeah, I can tell when someone has done it before.

- Not the first thing I've massaged, if you know mean.

(chefs laughing) So we're looking at this, right?

- [Chef Marc] Yep.

- [Yia] And then little press?

- [Chef Marc] Yeah press.

Perfect you see, it just bounce back.

- [Yia] It's like life, you know?

You get to bounce back up in life.

- So now it's ready, you're just gonna wrap it and put it in the fridge.

- [Yia] Okay.

- [Chef Marc] For the next 12 hours.

- I'll see you in 12 hours.

- Yeah, see you in 12 hours.

- How you eat it or the game, is the youngest one will go to the table and someone will be cutting slices and we'll be asking the youngest one, "Hey, who would you like this slice to go to?"

Whoever gets the trinket, the fève, get to be the king or the queen and the next time that person will have to bring the King's Cake.

So it's been 12 hours and in the meantime, I made you your own dough.

- [Yia] It almost feels hollow.

- Yes because he has gas pushing from the inside out.

Just press on it like moving back and forth.

Food, I mean for me, is just about good memories from the past with my family.

In French Guiana, every weekend we had to go to the farmers market.

Wake up at one in the morning, the two hours commute to go to the city and I was very hungry.

And there was a bakery right next to the farmer's market and they were starting baking the vennoiserie or the croissant and you had the smell of the butter.

I was just like, oh my god, that was the only part of what will make me wanna wake up in the morning 'cause I knew that, okay, I'm gonna have a croissant.

Grab your butter.

- Can I tell you that this is the first time I've ever laminated a dough before?

- Just place it in the center and you're gonna come and close it.

So if you have a gap like me right here, you can just pull it.

- [Yia] Oh yeah.

- So remember what we just did?

So we're gonna do it again with the butter.

(peaceful music) - Hmong food is completely the opposite of European, right?

There's no dairy, there's no butter, you know what I'm saying?

There's no wheat.

- My dad is very... Like his style of food is very European, French, and my mom still very Hmong, very Asian.

In my village of Hmong, we were the only one that had French breakfast.

- [Yia] Growing up then, did you feel like you lived in two different worlds or... - I did, that I was ashamed of being who I was, who I am.

In some ways reject my identity.

It's only growing up, you know that you truly embrace who you are and what you like.

I'm a Hmong person but I love French food.

- [Yia] I can see why they let a machine do this now, dude.

- [Chef Marc] Yeah.

- Okay hold on, I gotta stretch.

I gotta stretch so does the dough, I do too, okay.

- So now we're gonna fold it halfway through and then just close it like a book.

So what we just did right now is what we call a double turn.

You have four layers one, two, three, four.

Bring it back to you like that and guess what?

- Start over again?

- Yeah, start over again.

(cheery electro-jazz music) - French Guiana, you left to go to France.

- [Chef Marc] To go to France.

- [Yia] High school and college.

- High school, college, and then I came to the US.

2012 I came in vacation to St. Paul, Minnesota, meeting the love of my life here.

(bright music) So when I came, I was in medical school in France so I came during summer of 2012.

- You were gonna be a doctor?

- Just like what all parents want.

- All parents want for us.

Okay, chef.

- Okay?

All right so now we're gonna do a single turn, so single turn is three layers.

Earlier, double turn was four layers, about one third and from here another 12 hours.

- Let's go find something to eat dude.

- And decided to and follow my passion and go back to France, to Paris to study pastry.

Here we are here, so we're gonna slice like so, so make sure you stay straight and that's gonna come to cover the top here.

Butter, dough, butter, dough.

- [Yia] Yeah.

- [Chef Marc] So when it bakes, so the butter is gonna melt and it's gonna pop and it's gonna create the layers, so you're gonna see the layers on top like a zebra.

- Was there a lot of convincing for your family when you wanted to take this route doing french pastry?

- They were all against me, they were just like, "No, you're gonna fail."

I didn't have anybody to show my parents, "Hey, it's fine look, he or she did it and it's a safe path for us."

They just wants what's best for you.

- That's true, yeah.

- Here we go again but- - Here we go.

- For one last time.

(Yia playfully yells) Let's go.

(lively French hip-hop music) - Okay it looks good.

- Oh thank you chef, oh oui chef.

- I actually had a chance to do a five month stage at the oldest pastry shop in Paris, (cheery French music) under the Executive Pastry Chef Jeffrey Cagnes.

I really wanted to come back to Minnesota to share what I've learned.

We called my in-laws and I was like, "Hey, please could we come back, use one of the kitchen to start our business?"

And with the last 200 bucks, get a bag of flour, almond flour, butter, sugar and to make the first King's Cake.

We're making the filling, the almond cream.

Almond flour, sugar, butter, and a whole egg.

- Some people just think like you're make a cream and put almond extract.

Why do you use almond flour?

- So for the taste and for the texture, and also the aroma it's way better than an extract.

- Making this filling is almost kind of like a little almond cake-ish, right?

- Yeah pretty much, yes.

- Inside, right?

Because it's flour, you know?

- Exactly.

- Smelling this is just incredible.

- So be careful the splashes.

(KitchenAid mixing) - [Chef Marc] Okay.

(lively music) (piping bags crinkling) So we're just gonna cut each log, I guess, into like triangle.

- [Yia] Okay.

- And just come place them all around.

So Yia, you were talking about the trinket, the fève, so in this case, we're gonna use a whole almond right here, hide it in.

(lively French music) ("Clair de Lune" by Debussy) All right.

- Oh here we go, buddy.

It's been like two weeks now, finally we're done.

(King's Cake crunches) (Yia indistinctly commenting) Oh my god, it's like that butter.

Oh the French, they know how to do their butter.

- Yeah.

- I think one of the greatest things that I love about getting to know you is that we wanna hustle, we want to do the things that's in our hearts, and I think that there's so many stories within our people.

- We're just two Hmong kids that are doing what they love and yeah, that's the most important thing.

- And you know, look what I found!

- What did you find?

- I found the almond!

- [Chef Marc] Oh no way.

- Yeah look at that.

- True piece of my history, so now you're part of it.

- Yeah thanks, brother.

Appreciate it.

- My pleasure.

- Cakes like Marc's King Cake look deceptively simple, but actually requires a lot of time, technique, and what the French will call finesse.

Thankfully you don't have to get a culinary degree to make an impressive bake, sometimes you just need the right pan.

(choir music) Hi, I'm Yia.

- Hey Yia, I'm Jenny.

Do you wanna go take a tour?

- Yeah, let's do it.

- Okay.

- Never been here before.

Meet Jennifer Dalquist, a baking enthusiast who helps run the family business that her grandparents started in 1946.

It's right here that the very first Bundt cake pan was invented.

So gimme a little bit of the history of this place.

- [Jenny] Everyone nowadays knows us for the Bundt pan but believe it or not, that was actually not even part of the company for the first decade that we were in business.

We have over 500 different products that we make.

This is a 300 ton press that forms the basic outline of a cookie sheet.

- At our restaurant, we use this every day.

This is like a workhorse for us.

- Staple.

My grandfather was a chemical engineer and had some metal working background.

- [Yia] It's kind of heavy.

- Yes, it's thousands of pounds of wire.

He joined forces with my grandmother, my grandma was a hundred percent Danish.

Started out in my grandparents' basement, like quite literally and was originally just a handful of Scandinavian ethnic products.

Ebelskiver, krumkake, things that she couldn't find in this country.

- Sounds like word you're making up, you know that.

- Right.

- You grew up around these factories, eh?

- I did oftentimes come over here as a kid.

My mom wanted me outta the house and my dad was heading into the office on the weekends.

This is where we do a lot of secondary finishing operations on the iconic classic Bundt design.

- Cue "The Nutcracker" music.

("Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from "The Nutcracker") - Now I wanna dig into the Bundt cake.

- My grandfather was approached by a couple of women from a local synagogue and they were part of something called the Hadassah Society.

And they brought my grandfather this pan, and they said, "This is an old world baking pan that we brought with us, can you make this?"

Several hundred years ago in Europe, this mold with a tube in the center of it was making something called Gugelhopf.

So for the first decade that this pan was being produced by Nordic Ware, it really didn't catch on, it had a very small local following.

- So how does it go from that to America's pan?

- In 1966, a woman from Texas named Ella Helfrich, got second place in the Pillsbury Bakeoff and her recipe is something called Tunnel of Fudge Cake.

And guess what kind of pan you have to have to bake tunnel of fudge cake?

That all of a sudden puts the Bundt pan on the map, every household in America wants a Bundt pan and- - But she didn't win.

- Didn't even win first prize.

Literally overnight, we were trying to keep up with the demand of everyone calling and trying to order a Bundt pan so- - Bundt doesn't mean anything... - The women kept calling it a bund pan.

It loosely in German means gathering of people, so we've said over the years, it's a cake that you bring to a gathering.

(powerful music) - Tell me your earliest memory of baking.

- When I was a kid, I would set up a tripod, and pretend like I was filming a baking show.

I am really excited to bake with you today and this is not just any old Bundt cake.

This is the Tunnel of Fudge Bundt cake.

And I would have little friends over after school and we would like make chocolate chip cookies, and talk as if we were talking to the camera.

- Did you feel a calling to get into the business?

- [Jenny] I had always been drawn to chemistry.

I went off to college, was focused on that.

- I don't have a chemistry background, and so I'm really nervous if I mess this up.

- This is pretty hard to mess up.

- Bundt cakes, different than your regular sheet cake?

- For sure, it's a really heavy, dense batter.

A lot of butter, a lot of sugar.

Do you know what the hole in the middle is for?

- [Yia] No.

- Okay, so the cone in the middle of a Bundt pan, if you think of the type of cake batter that you bake a Bundt with... You get that creaming and I'm gonna measure out our sugar here.

They take a long time to cook, but when you suddenly put a funnel up through the middle of it, the heat up into the center of the cake, and it cooks a lot more quickly.

- Why those ridges?

Like why did grandpa design it like that?

- Part of it is aesthetics, it just makes a really beautiful cake, but it's also practical.

It's your slicing lines.

Ended up redirecting and going into business, and then landed here.

And one of the things that I love about my job is that you do get to get involved in baking and there's a lot of chemistry that goes into baking.

(exciting music) (mixer mixes) You can turn it off now.

(walnuts scraping) I'm gonna give you some chopped walnuts, and these are chopped to pretty fine consistency.

- [Yia] Even the little cups you guys make here- - They're Bundt shaped, I know it's a little too much.

- It's like intentional or something.

- We need three quarters of a cup of cocoa powder.

I sifted that, so to get the lumps out of it and that is kind of an important step with this.

Just throw a tiny little bit more on top.

- Oh my god, I knew you were gonna say that.

- Cause you don't... That's perfect.

- I feel like a barista now.

(Jenny laughs) - Alright, we're adding flour next.

I know you've heard me talk enough about sifting, but I sifted the flour.

- That- - Yes.

- Is very, very important when it comes to baking.

- [Jenny] You either taste the clumps or you end up with way more of an ingredient than you intended to.

- Oh it's starting to come together here.

- It is unusual for a cake batter to have this much powdered sugar in it, but that is part of the magic of Tunnel of Fudge.

- [Yia] I mean, you know... - [Jenny] Why not?

- Hey, if we're gonna go in the tunnel, let's go in the tunnel.

Oh here we go.

- [Jenny] Nice, rich, dark.

- It's like a brownie batter there.

- It is, I told you it's basically...

The finished product tastes like a brownie, but the batter tastes like chocolate frosting on it.

One of the reasons people most frequently experience a fail with a Bundt, is that they did not prep the pan properly.

- What would you consider as a fail with a Bundt?

- Doesn't come out of the pan.

I happen to be a purist and I like to brush a pan with a generous amount of butter.

You can also use a baking spray, but it has to be a spray that is specifically for baking because they put flour in the spray.

- [Yia] So remember to bring Pam along?

- Yes.

- Invite her to the party.

- Not Karen but Pam.

- But Pam, Pam's the friend, okay?

- Normally you would grease and flour, but we're baking a chocolate cake, so if you put flour on the inside of here, it's gonna make the outside of your cake white.

But no worries because you can dust with cocoa powder just as easily.

(orchestral music) (pan tapping) (orchestral music continues) See what I mean about like, it's literally like working with brownie batter.

When I baked with Martha Stewart on her show.

- Jennifer Dalquist, hi.

- Hi Martha.

- Nice to have you here.

- She got all over me for not properly scraping the inside the bowl.

- Oh well, you know, she comes from a different generation.

- Okay, so there's one final trick.

You have this really heavy done batter but you want it to take the shape of this pan.

- Oh okay.

- So and you're gonna go whack, whack, whack like a couple of times pretty firmly.

(lively music) (Bundt pan bangs) Yes.

(Bundt pan bangs) Okay, that's awesome.

(oven beeps) (lively music) - What do we have here?

- These are some of the very earliest cookbooks that my grandmother Dotty helped author.

When the Bundt pan was first available in the United States, there weren't recipes that existed for a Bundt pan.

So we were making Bundt pans but having trouble selling them.

So my grandma Dotty rolled up her sleeves, got to work in the kitchen, and she wrote several hundred recipes in this book.

- [Yia] Mushroom Meat Ring.

- [Jenny] Ham Ring?

So there are some unusual recipes in here, but the ones that have survived the test of time are more of the classic baked desserts and cakes.

- What's the most unique item made with a Bundt pan?

- Do you know that you can roast a chicken on a Bundt?

- Yes, kind of like a beer can type, right?

- Exactly.

- Yes.

- Yep.

- Why do you think Bundt cakes are the top dish to bring in to family gatherings, whatever?

- You don't have to be a super talented baker to end up with this cake that looks like a knockout because the design is all baked in the cake.

Also, Bundt cakes are never dry, they're always like super dense and moist and just awesome.

(uplifting music) This is the one Bundt cake that you let cool for a full hour.

With a normal Bundt cake recipe, you'd pull it out and you'd cool like eight to 10 minutes, and then you'd pop it outta the pan.

(lively music in Swedish) You want me to do a drum roll for it?

- I'm so scared.

(lively music in Swedish) (cream pouring) (lively music continues) - We all have so many good memories that are associated with the food that we eat or that we enjoy with other people.

And you wanna kind of recreate that year after year.

The Bundt has been around for enough generations in the United States that it's something that people our age grew up with and it kind of becomes a part of your tradition.

- [Yia] There's a nostalgia to it.

- Yeah.

I come to work every day and I have this sense of like, this is something pretty special.

We've gotta kind of nurture this and keep this going.

I like these little pools.

- [Yia] Yeah.

- [Jenny] That looks kind of nice, yeah.

- Yeah you know, like art is very subjective.

- So this is more Walker Art Center than MIA.

- Oh, oh okay, okay yeah.

(calming music) - [Jenny] I'm really excited to try this.

Would you like a scoop of vanilla ice cream?

- What is, yes?

(bright music) (Yia savoring) Delicious.

I mean, you're right, it's so moist.

- I think this should have done better than second place in the Pillsbury Bakeoff.

- How does it feel as part of that, you know, part of the family, to see how far it's come?

- I know that my grandfather would be really proud to see the way that we have expanded and the way that we're thriving.

It's more than he probably could have imagined, but none of this would've happened if he hadn't spent decades of his life with my grandma, you know having a dream and just making it happen through hard work.

- Thank you so much for showing me around.

Thank you for helping me make my first Bundt cake.

- You did an amazing job, this is spectacular.

- [Yia] Well, thank you so much.

(lively jazz music) No matter how rustic or technical, how dense or flaky, (lively jazz music) cakes like these are an invitation to share a slice of home.

- I'm not gonna need dinner tonight.

- [Yia] Bon appetit!

(cheery jazz music) (bright music) (ambient music)