Cake 6 - Chinese Style Custard Tarts

Baking a cake Malaysian style is entering into the unknown for me. With ingredients ranging from pandan leaves to glutinous rice flour, and cooking methods including steaming, it was never going to be a straight forward task. Shopping for ingredients is an experience in itself. Everything you struggle to find in the UK for your oriental recipes is here in abundance, whereas finding something like vanilla extract becomes like the quest for the Holy Grail! Anyway, after a week of looking for recipes and asking advice from Malaysian friends, I decided to start off with an East meets West fusion – something to ease me in gently before I start messing around with banana leaves or agar agar.

I chose to bake Chinese Style Custard Tarts. “Chinese?” I hear you say, “That’s not a Malaysian recipe!” Well, as it happens, Malaysia is a melting pot of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and the Chinese influence here is huge. In most bakeries in Malaysia you will find these little custard tarts, and they are enjoyed by all. So, history lesson over – now onto the baking itself.

The first thing to do was to make the pastry which unlike English style custard tart pastry, contained sugar and an exceedingly large quantity of butter. English pastry is usually half fat to flour, but this was probably three quarters fat. I feel like I'm committing a sin just writing this, that much butter is so decadent and wrong...but let's not dwell on that too much.

Once I had mixed the butter and sugar in a bowl, I had to add an egg along with the flour, and stir it all together. I felt like I had broken every rule of making pastry in one go. Anyone who has made pastry knows that you don't just stir it all together, and you certainly don't make it in a kitchen at 35 degrees. Just leaving the butter out on the work surface for 2 minutes resulted in an oil slick. To avoid disaster I wrapped the finished ball of stirred together pastry in tinfoil, and put in the fridge to keep cool. It was then time to turn my attention to the filling.

The first thing you notice about a Chinese custard tart is that it is considerably more yellow than an English one. I thought this was probably due to the addition of yellow food colouring, seeing as most of the desserts here are brightly coloured. As it turns out, I was wrong - it’s because Chinese custards use a lot more egg. Nine in fact. It's official, I have never used as many eggs in a recipe!

The method for making the custard was as different as that of the crust. I boiled water and sugar in a pan on the stove, and then allowed to cool back to room temperature - which was probably almost as hot as the pan. I then added the nine whisked eggs, and poured these into the water along with a dash of milk. The recipe did recommend that you strain the mixture, but after a feeble attempt at pouring the liquid through a sieve the size of a tea strain I decided I didn't have the tools for the job.

Having avoided the inevitable for some time now, I decided to take a deep breath and turn--on--the--oven. Gasp.

I brought the pastry back out of the fridge and quickly set about pressing balls of the mixture into the cake moulds. The trick is to roll a ball of pastry, and press into the mould with your fingers, starting in the middle so that the pastry is automatically pushed up at the sides. I had never used this method before, but it worked wonders! When this was done, I poured the bright yellow custard mixture into the pastry cases, put into the oven to bake, and retreated to a safe distance away from the heat.

When baked, they looked like little sunshines, all sparkly and yellow in the middle, with lightly browned crisp and buttery pastry cases. Taste wise, the sweet egg custard filling lived up to its name, with the egg being a lot more prominent than in a custard of western origin. The pastry crust was just melt in your mouth gorgeous, and reminded me a lot of shortbread. Once again, I used the security guards as my taste panel – which I must point out is not because my parents are under house arrest, they guard the condo in which they live! All agreed that the Chinese Style Custard Tarts were a worthy tribute to the Malaysian favourite.

Cake 5 - Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake

This week's cake was brought to you all the way from my Mum's kitchen in the beautiful city that is Kuala Lumpur - which means my blog has now become international! Cue round of applause.

As a source of inspiration, I turned to the only cookery book which made the journey from their house in Chester, all the way across the 7 seas to their Malaysian Condo. This is none other than the ledgendary Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook published circa 1970. This cook book is the source of some fantasticly strange retro creations including Turkey in Aspic and Salmon Mousse, but would I find a dessert suitable for this tropical climate and cooking utensils available? After toying with the idea of a pineapple upsidedown cake, I instead turned to another well known source of inspiration.......the meal on the plane!

I was pleasantly surprised by the dessert on the aeroplane, which I think in the absence of a menu was a ginger cheesecake. It went some way in compensating for the sorry excuse for an omlette served at breakfast, the bread rolls the texture of tennis balls, and the air hostess who told me off for being noisy. I thought to myself as I ate the dessert out of its little plastic coffin at 30,000 feet, “I could do a version of this!”

After visiting the local grocery shop and selecting my ingredients, I set to work in my Mums 34 degree kitchen finding the utensils and lining an oval tin with a removable bottom. I then moved on to making the base. For this I had to turn ginger biscuits into crumbs and mix with butter on the hob. My Mum does not own a food processor, so I ended up putting the biscuits in an empty bread bag and battering them within an inch of their lives with a rolling pin. The result was acceptable, so after mixing with the melted butter, I set about pressing the crunchy ginger base in the cake tin.

For the topping, I mixed mascarpone cheese with grated lemon zest, lemon juice, and sugar. I had selected another local cream cheese to mix with my expensive imported mascarpone, but upon tasting it realised that it contained more salt than you would find in haloumi! I was glad I tasted it before I mixed it in with the rest of the topping. The heat of the kitchen meant that the mixture went runny very quickly, and I was a bit worried that it wouldn't set.....but I poured it onto the now chilled base, refrigerated, and hoped for the best.

After a couple of hours by the pool the lemon and ginger cheesecake was ready. To my relief, it had set beautifully. I cut into slices and served to my Mum and Dad, and also the security guards who looked like they could do with a cake break. The lemon and ginger was so refreshing in the hot climate, and the crunch of the ginger biscuits worked really well against the smooth creaminess of the mascarpone. Mum suggested we put some tinned oranges on the side, which although I was not at all sure about definitely added something!

Now I am signing off and going to the seaside town of Kuantan, where I hope to get some ideas for next week's cake. I may try something Malaysian inspired......until next week.

Cake 4 - Chocolate Rice Crispy Cakes

Picture the situation. You've woken up late, you have a plane to catch, a case to pack, and your best underwear to root out of the ironing basket. Your head is saying "Pack the case" and your heart is saying "Bake a cake." When faced with this dilemma, compromise is the only way forward. This blog is about real life, and sometimes you just don't have time to make a black forest gateau. This is when the crispy cake provides you with a get out of jail free card. For the amount of work and preparation that goes into this creation, it really shouldn't taste as good as it does. If you have kids, you can even get them to help, so long as you don't mind your kitchen walls being pebble dashed with rice crispies.

I don't have any children, so I enlisted the help of my boyfriend Tobey. I would have got Miffy the rabbit involved, but due to the amount of fur she has on her hands she would no way pass a basic food hygiene test. Sorry Miffy :(

First melt the chocolate. I like to use both milk and dark chocolate together, but it's personal preference. Maybe you have some left over Easter eggs? Food boffins will tell you to melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of hot water, but when time is short I like to use a microwave. Just be careful not to leave it in too long. Then pour the melted chocolate over a large bowl of rice crispies, and stir until all the rice crispies are covered.

Now I am going to tell you a secret to make your rice crispy cakes extra special. I discovered this when I had run out of golden syrup, and had to improvise fast in order to bind the crispies together successfully. To give the cakes a stickiness that both keeps them in the desired shape, and creates a 'toffee crisp' effect add some honey to the mixture. The result is fantastic, but not overpowering. You can add golden syrup if preferred...the choice is yours!

When putting into cake cases, you can push a mini egg into the centre to make a nest. Always make sure you have a little bit left in the bowl to eat while its still warm, and it tastes even better if you get it all over your face in the process!

Next weeks cake will be brought to you from my parents kitchen in Malaysia.

Cake 3 - Caribbean Banana Bread

At a time when chocolate eggs are eaten for breakfast, I decided that we needed a cake that would be both healthy and rejuvenating, and provide some cake escapism from Easter excess. For this there was only ever going to be one option - a banana loaf. The picture itself looks very uninspiring, but then a banana loaf is all about the taste not the look. A banana loaf is a no nonsense, down to earth cake that does exactly what it says on the tin. However, there is much more to this particular homely creation than meets the eye. Let me attempt to awaken your senses to the delights of 'Caribbean Banana Bread'

First I had to mix together the butter and sugar. I used margarine for this recipe - it tastes just as good but with less calories. Then I added two eggs and whisked until the mixture was light and fluffy. The next step was to combine flour, grated nutmeg, and half a teaspoon of baking powder. The last and most important part was to add to the mixture two mashed bananas, two tablespoons of honey, and chopped pecan nuts.

There is something about the smell of baking banana drifting from the oven that fills me with well being, and evokes wonderful memories of eating banana cake in a cafe called Libra in Lancaster as a kid.

After forty minutes the cake to turned a shade of golden and had risen into craggy peak bursting with flavour. All I had to do now was wait.

Waiting for the cake to cool is the part I find most challenging. When I turned the tin upside down to release the cake, the hammer marks on my literally battered old loaf tin reminded me that this may not be easy. I proceed to smack the tin with various heavy objects until the cake was released - minus its bottom. After resisting the urge to throw the tin against the wall, I carefully removed the bottom of the cake from the tin, stuck it back to the rest of the cake and served it up like nothing had happened. It tasted delicious. So light and fluffy with a good dose of crunch from the pecan nuts. The honey complimented the banana so well, that I almost forgot the strife involved in the making of this 'simple' cake.

In cooking there is always an element or risk involved, and there is certainly a moral to this story. Two actually. The first moral is that patience is a virtue and it is always better to let a cake cool completely if one wants to avoid this kind of disaster. The second moral is that with a bit of improvisation even the biggest of cake flops can be hidden.

So, a cake baked and a lesson learnt. What more could you ask for?!