Pandan Chiffon/ Sponge Cake (cooked dough/ 烫面）

This lovely soft Pandan sponge cake is baked using a cooked dough method. The result is a soft cottony cake that would dupe you into eating piece after piece thinking it is just a light dessert. Look at the fine crumb.

I saw the recipe from Jeannie Tay’s blog. The method is however, not the easiest, quite challenging for an amateur like me. The cooked dough required some judgement on the paste, the water bath requires additional equipment. I also decided to use fresh Pandan leaves for this, so there’s another extra step to extract the juice. I am rewarded with a light natural green instead of the usual neon Martian green from using a paste/ essence. A bigger reward is that 2 of such cakes were devoured over 2 days by my family, they are really just so good.

Recipe ( adapted from Jeannie Tay for 7″ cake tin)

100g Pandan juice (squeezed from about 8-10 leaves blended with about 90ml water)
20 g coconut milk
128g cake flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
80g oil
4 egg yolks
5 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
100g sugar

Method

Pandan Juice

Wash and soak leaves for a few minutes, then cut into small pieces.

Using an electric blender, add in the water and blend till fine.You can add in the coconut milk at this stage too. Place a sieve over a container and squeeze out the juice with your hands.

Measure out the correct amount, for this recipe, you should have a total of 120g Pandan juice with coconut milk. Set aside.

In a separate pot, hit up the oil with low heat till 70 deg C. Remove from heat and add in the flour, baking powder and salt at one go. Stir till a paste is formed.

Add in the Pandan coconut milk, eggs and whisk till a thick batter forms. Set aside.

Whip egg whites till large bubble forms, add in cream of tartar, then sugar gradually till stiff peak.

Add 1/3 of meringue to Pandan batter to loosen it with a hand whisk, then pour all of this mixture back to the meringue and mix gently with spatula till no trace of egg white can be seen.

Pour batter into a 7″ loose form tin. Prepare the tin beforehand by wrapping the base with aluminium foil. Place the cake tin into a larger one that should contain 1-2 cm depth of hot water. Place both tins into oven pre heated to 170 deg c.