Sam's Cupcakery

Pandan Chiffon Cake

This is one of my all time favourite cakes, very light and full of flavour. When I found this recipe by Christine, I had to try it out – homemade is much nicer than the shop-bought version! The cake gets is green colouring from pandan leaves (the shop-bought ones tend to have artificial colouring to make it super green). Essentially it’s an angel food cake, except it’s flavoured with pandan rather than vanilla. Not all that difficult to make, as long as you get the egg whites right.. 

I’ve adjusted the recipe slightly since the last time I made the cake, so it gives a much stronger flavour. I opted for pandan leaves rather than pandan essence – mainly for a better flavour and I could only locate the leaves (Loon Fung in London’s Chinatown sells a 200g pack for £1.75).

The recipe suggests using 10 pandan leaves and 1.5 tbsps of water to make 2 tbsps of pandan juice – I ended up using 20 leaves (approx. 200g) and 4 tbsps of water. One thing you will find out whilst making this cake is the extremely difficult task of squeezing juice from the leaves.. if you have a muslin cloth, I highly suggest you use it and if you don’t, get one! I used my hands and it took me a long while to get any juice out, which is one of the reasons why I increased the amount of leaves and water.

The recipe also calls for ‘cake flour’ – if you can find it, good on you. If you can’t, add 18g of cornflour to 122g of plain flour and you’ll get 140g of cake flour (recipe calls for 100g, so just adjust accordingly).

Christine’s recipe is very detailed and explains all the stages very clearly, so have a good read through if you attempt the cake. She does mention using pandan essence to achieve the green colour and not using it will result in a light yellow cake – this didn’t seem to be the case with mine, both times it turned out a light green using just the leaves.

I used an 8 inch bundt tin, but if you don’t have one (or a cake tin with a hole in the middle), you can create a makeshift ‘hole’ with a thin drinks can (i.e. red bull can), wrapped in baking paper and anchor it in the centre.

I had some difficulty getting my cake out of the tin because of the grooves in the bundt tin (you’re not supposed to grease it!) so would highly suggest using the standard flat tin that Christine has used in hers.

All in all, a great cake to make and taste. Something new for you to try!