Working with anything that involves beating a large amount of egg whites and having to fold it into a batter almost scares me half to death. I worry too much if my egg whites are looking the way they’re supposed to be, if i’m folding the batter a little too much, if my cake will ever rise. There are a million times that plague me as i go about making the cake and usually ends with me keeping my fingers firmly crossed while my cake does its magic in the oven.
I have to admit though that the only thing i ever made that called for this method (and failed miserably at) was a genoise cake. It wasn’t pretty- i suspect my egg whites were a little overbeaten and that i had folded them in a little too much- and it was enough to put me off cakes like that for a while.
What made me even begin to think about having a chiffon cake was a little Su Zhuonese girl i met while on my recent trip to Shanghai. In ten minutes flat, she wiped out half a pandan cake we had brought for a friend we were staying with. All of a sudden, i couldn’t get chiffon cakes out of my head and lucky for me, we happen to have a thriving, gorgeous pandan plant in the garden.
I didn’t have a proper chiffon cake pan so i took a clean, empty milk tin, put it in the middle of a springform cake pan with its removable bottom lined and filled it with uncooked beans to weigh it down. It worked perfectly. What wasn’t so perfect though was the recipe i started off with- i had a cake that rose and browned too quickly, starting to crack while the batter at the bottom wasn’t cooking. In addition to having trouble beating the egg whites to stiff peaks without the addition of sugar, It was nothing short of a disaster.
After significantly reducing the amount of baking powder in the recipe, baking the cake at a lower temperature and adding a little sugar to the egg whites at soft peaks, what came out of the oven was a gorgeous, fragrant, fluffy cake, a beautiful shade of green even without any colouring added.
While the cake came out beautifully, in reading up on the how and whys of the science behind the cake, I’ve noticed that various other recipes online call for the same amount of flour and fewer eggs. I’m hoping to make a lemon chiffon cake recipe from the legendery Cake Bible and get a better insight into the structure of the cake.
Meanwhile, i think it’s safe to say i’m slowly but surely getting over my fear of cakes that involve meringue. Having this deliciously light cake freshly baked sure is one hell of a motivator.
Pandan Chiffon Cake [adapted from Mrs Leong Yee Soo's The Best of Singapore Cooking]
Ingredients
1 grated white coconut
9 large egg whites, at room temperature
1 tsp cream of tartar (i used white vinegar)
2 tbsp screw pine juice- 12 screw pine leaves blended with a bit of water and strained
8 large egg yolks
200g castor sugar
170ml corn oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
140g Softasilk flour (i used cake flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
- Preheat oven at 160C. Mix the grated coconut with three to four tablespoons of water. Squeeze the moist coconut with your hands till you get 170ml of coconut milk, adding a little more water to the grated coconut as you go along if needed. Bring the coconut milk to boil over low heat, till it thickens to the consistency of pouring cream. Set milk aside to cool completely.
- In a medium bowl, whisk egg yolks, sugar, oil and vanilla together till a thick mixture forms and set aside. Sift flour, baking powder and salt twice into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and pour yolk mixture into the flour mixture, folding the flour in gently. Add the pandan juice and coconut milk to the mixture and mix till just combined.
- Using an electric mixer, beat egg whites till frothy. Add cream of tartar or white vinegar in and keep beating on medium speed till soft peaks form. Add 1 tbsp of castor sugar to egg whites and beat at low speed till stiff peaks form.
- Using a whisk, gently fold the egg whites into the yolk mixture in two batches till just combined. Pour mixture into a ungreased 10 inch chiffon pan or a makeshift pan of the same size. Bake cake in the middle of the oven for about 45 to 50 minutes till cake pressed back when lightly pressed with a finger. Remove cake pan from oven and invert over a wire rack to cool for at least an hour. Gently remove cake from pan before serving. Serves 8
