Pandan chiffon cake

Lately there has been a dearth of sweet things to take into work. I didn’t think anyone had noticed, although the biscuit jar with nothing but crumbs of biscotti left in it was found with a card taped inside. (That card’s been doing the rounds from coffee machine to fridge shelves, gathering penned additions as it goes, so maybe I’m reading too much into it.)

Anyway, I had anything but a dearth of eggs,  due to a shopping double-up between me and The Guitar Teacher, so an eight-egg Pandan Chiffon Cake seemed called for. In my continuing quest for a chiffon cake that stands tall and strong instead of puffy and sagging, I turned online to Life Is Great, which indeed looked to be the goods, even if the name of the blog is more optimistic than I am wont to be.

I love the smell of pandan, and add frozen strips of it to rice wherever possible. Minh Phat had bright green fresh stuff, so I followed the instruction to blend it with 4 tablespoons of water and push it through a sieve to make half a cup. It didn’t quite make it, for me, so I topped it up with water – I baulked at opening a can of coconut milk for a teaspoon or two. It smelled like wondrous wheatgrass.

Otherwise, my only tweak was to use olive oil in place of corn oil, and to add just a tiny bit of green food-colouring gel.

Like Life Is Great, I don’t keep self-raising flour around the house, but I was bemused by the recipe to make it up with 2 tablespoons of baking powder for 180g flour, plus the half teaspoon of bicarb in the main recipe. She seemed to know what she was talking about, though, so I went ahead with that. The batter turned out frothy and heaving, and perilously close to the top of the chiffon-cake pan, but still I went stolidly ahead. 

And surprise surprise, it kept rising. That it didn’t overflow all over the oven I considered a win, but the centre hole was compromised and the top was very uneven.

Turned out, it quickly attempted to find its level and succumbed to gravity. It puffed out around the bottom, had nothing in common with Life Is Good’s elegant green cake, and seemed to have a sticky layer that wasn’t quite cooked – and oddly salty. 

But the flavour was deemed 'WEIRD BUT GOOD!!!!!!!!’ by Misslice, the texture was chiffon-cake fantastique, and the aroma of pandan pervaded the work kitchen – a good thing, I thought. 

Despite all that, it was not polished off with the usual enthusiasm – was it the green?

Chocolate-orange hazelnut chiffon cake

Poh’s chiffon cake is a three-layered extravanganza stuffed with cream and hazelnuts and covered with ganache; it has coconut milk in it, and lots of zest and orange juice. The zest came courtesy of The Saucemaker’s unsprayed, unwaxed backyard-grown oranges, but I used deep red blood orange juice from un-organic oranges; I wanted pink cake, but in spite of the promise in the measuring jug, it turned out plain old white.

 

Sooo before yesterday’s attempt, the couple more goes at chiffon cake since the black sesame have turned out like so many macarons...

...but a tiny chink of logic filtered through to my insomnia-ridden frontal lobe.

I’d been observing the chiffon-cake rule about not greasing or lining the tin, but also following the advice of some false friends on the internet about still lining the base so that only the sides need to have a knife run around them once cool. 

Of course, it’s largely the cake adhering to the base when inverted that prevents it from falling into a flat tasty pancake. And of course my tin has a removable base anyway, so releasing the cake from that is eminently doable.

This looked almost as it should. It was a bit lopsided, and the top didn’t quite make it in one piece, and in slicing it into three it became clear that one side was more cooked than the other.

 

The ganache filled any nooks and crannies on top but then wasn’t sufficient to cover the sides as well; the two layers of cream wanted to break free from their confines and meld with the ganache. 

 But the texture was what I imagine it should be, and the hint of orange and crunch of hazelnut and ooze of whipped cream were all good. And with about five eggs per mouthful, unbelievably rich and filling.

Black sesame chiffon cake

Ever since I got Keiko Ishida’s Okashi: sweet treats made with love, I’ve been eyeing off the three chiffon cakes and waiting for a chance. It happened to be Alida Irwin’s 111^th birthday recently, and I put together a Japanese meal – I thought she, as a woman of the 1920s, might find a touch of the Orient interesting and exotic, but it turned out she’d already been there twice and had actually done a stint as a Noh entertainer while carving out her illustrious career as an undercover spy. But I digress.

For dessert I decided at the last minute to have a go at Keiko’s black sesame chiffon cake, which looked so majestic, tall and plain, pure white on the outside and porous grey-black inside. It seemed my regular non-stick little-used Bundt tin might do for it; I even had black sesame seeds on hand. And it wasn’t bad, for a first go, and for one with no concept whatsoever about chiffon cakes.

Its strangely elastic yet light texture, which seemed at odds with its 5 eggs, piqued my interest, and I decided to look further into the subject. On Google, I found chiffon cake was, variously, a Malaysian sweet and one invented by a Californian salesman in the 1940s. Either way, a tube tin that wasn’t non-stick or even greased was needed, and ideally would have little feet at the top so it could be inverted to cool the baked cake – eliminating collapse. Various sources claimed chiffon cake tins could be got at any Asian grocery for a song.

I embarked on a quest through the not-inconsiderable number of Asian groceries in my area, spreading out from Brunswick Street to Richmond and Chinatown. No one had ever heard of them. I eventually got the tin at London & American stores, though it was 23 rather than 20cm. And I found it rusted if any water was allowed to be in its vicinity for longer than a few minutes, so it’s one of those things that has to be dried in a warm oven after washing.

Black sesame paste was another challenge, with treks to Minh Phat for items thus labelled yielding a sprinkle-able gray powder before the much more paste-like version was found.

So after all that, I put it together without any fuss, but the hard-won cake tin didn’t yield as good a result as Alida’s. It was rather vertically challenged and sad, though its texture and taste was good. Still, I’ll have another go at the red bean and matcha versions – after all, I spent $28 on another cake tin, and by God it will be put to use.

 (adapted from Keiko Ishida)

5 egg yolks
20g brown sugar
30g black sesame paste
60g water (yep, by weight)
40g vegetable oil
20g black toasted sesame seeds

5 egg whites
90g caster sugar
10g rice or corn flour

70g cake flour

250mL cream

20g caster sugar

more black sesame seeds to garnish

Centre a rack in the oven so a tallish tin can fit in, and preheat it to 170C. Sift flour.

Combine egg yolks, brown sugar and black sesame paste in a bowl and mix well. Add water and oil and mix well. Add flour and mix until batter becomes sticky, then fold in black sesame seeds.

For the meringue, combine sugar and corn flour. Beat egg whites until foamy. Gradually add sugar mixture and continue whisking till whites are glossy, with stiff peaks.

Add a third of the meringue into egg yolk mixture and fold lightly before folding in the remainder to just incorporate – you don’t want the weighty yolk mixture to deflate the buoyancy of the whites.Not that you necessarily want the pockets of white that I had, either.

Pour batter into an ungreased chiffon cake tin – I cut out a circle of baking paper to line the bottom, but that was all. Bake for 50 minutes. When cake is light brown on top, remove from the oven and turn it over, leaving it to cool.

Whip together the cream and sugar, and ice the cake with a spatula, avoiding crumb spreadage as best you can.

To remove chiffon cake from pan, run a spatula along the sides of the cake to release it. 

The next day, about a third its proper height