Chan conceived the idea with her friend, food consultant Mel Ng, around Lunar New Year this year, and quietly soft-launched the brand on her social media platform in April – at least, as quietly as someone with more than 140,000 followers on Instagram can.
In the months since, her single product has garnered cult status, selling out within minutes each time they’re released for pre-orders online. That must-have item? Kue lapis, a traditional Indonesian steamed dessert.
Chan reimagines the dessert – whose name translates as “layer cake” – for the Instagram generation.
Consisting of 18 thin layers of steamed coconut and pandan rice flour cake (more mochi-like than floury), her kue lapis stands out thanks to its striking colour gradient that goes from emerald green to rice white. (For Pride Month, Rumah also launched a limited-edition version rendered in vibrant rainbow hues.)
“Every time, we have to operate at least 10 hours to finish the whole batch,” Chan says. “It’s very labour intensive, and each cake can weigh up to 1kg [2.2lb].”
The process of steaming the cake layers one by one is already time-consuming (pour, steam for three to four minutes, repeat) but Chan says that the slow cooling process – of six to eight hours, to avoid the kind of condensation that could change the texture of the cakes – is what is crucial to their success.
“The perfect kue lapis should be chewy, bouncy and full of the right balance of flavour of pandan and coconut milk,” she says, pointing out that she uses a much higher ratio of pandan than usual to infuse into the fresh coconut milk.
She also adds a secret ingredient that she says helps give an extra rice-like fragrance to the cake.
But Chan wasn’t always a fan of this iconic sweet, despite being born in Jakarta, Indonesia and growing up half-Indonesian and half-Chinese in Hong Kong, where her late father ran a premium dried seafood business and her mother an Indonesian restaurant.
“It was actually my least favourite because my impression of it was that it had a very greasy, cakey texture and was very sweet,” she says. “So that’s why kue lapis was the very first Indonesian sweet I wanted to tackle when I started Rumah.”
Chan remembers how, as a child, her mother would introduce all manner of traditional Indonesian snacks into the household, yet food was never quite the thing that brought them together.
In fact, she says, her mother was so busy running her restaurant that they couldn’t spend much time together at all.
“Indonesian food was definitely not the bond between us, because it kind of took my mom away,” she says. “I was just a little kid, so I was just looking at my mom going around the restaurant being super hectic and busy. I couldn’t really get involved.”
At the same time, Chan knew she wanted to learn how to cook traditional Indonesian cuisine, but was hesitant to do it. When her grandmother became severely ill, however, all the knowledge Chan had absorbed over the years by watching her mother cook at home soon came to the fore.
Chan used food and cooking to help her mother cope.
“In order to encourage my mom and cheer everybody up, I suggested we cook something together,” she says.
She asked her mother to teach her how to make soto ayam, a soothing chicken soup that is tinged gold from turmeric, saying it would make great content for her Instagram followers.
“It was just an excuse,” she says with a smile. “I wanted to give her a distraction from my grandmother’s condition.”
Seeing how happy it made her mother, Chan realised how cooking “does not only fill up our tummies, but really heals our hearts and minds. Food acts like our common love language.”
She describes having more conversations with her mother and aunt about the recipes of their childhood, as well as what her father’s favourite dishes were, as moments that brought them closer together than ever before.
Having lost both her father and her grandmother within four years of each other hit Chan hard.
“I felt like I lost my purpose,” she says, quietly. “I had a long period of time constantly feeling really down … I felt really confused about my identity.”
The older I get, the more I realise that what I have is really amazing – the fact that I share both Chinese and Indonesian culture
Starting Rumah has given her a path to find herself again, she says, as well as the motivation to embrace her cultural background and shout louder about it, too. As an influencer with a sizeable following, she wants to use her platform and Rumah to celebrate Indonesian culture, as well as address misconceptions about it.
“In the month and a half after launching Rumah I could definitely tell that I had become more peaceful and happy, being able to share who I am and what I grew up eating to my followers,” she says.
“It reminded me that when I first started my influencer journey, I never really talked about my identity. I thought that people wouldn’t be interested in my cultural background.
“But the older I get, the more I realise that what I have is really amazing – the fact that I share both Chinese and Indonesian culture … and not everybody is able to speak both Chinese and Bahasa fluently. I should definitely make this a platform to really deliver and share Indonesian culture.”
In this way, Rumah grew to become a lifeline, a way for Chan to feel more connected to her roots, and to pay homage to those who came before her. The name of the brand, therefore, was an obvious choice.
“Rumah means ‘home’ in Indonesian. I wouldn’t call it any other name, because Rumah really is all about my family, inspired by my parents and my grandma,” she says.
“It’s who I am. It’s my identity.”
