Going shopping this weekend, I bought home a newly cut bunch of pandan leaves, which looked really fresh to the eyes. So I decided to make the other variety of chiffon cake: a chiffon cake with gentle green color of the pandan leaves and the natural aroma of pandan juice.
I don’t like using artificial color in my baking and cooking. I’ve searched for some recipes by others for this pandan chiffon cake, just to be disappointed because many of them used artificial green color to imitate the natural color of the pandan leaves. And those recipes are for large pan and many servings. So I returned to my previously made orange chiffon.
Sometimes making chiffon cake is quite enjoyable to me. I don’t have to think about whether I need to put the butter out of the fridge to soften it first, though this chiffon cake requires pureeing the pandan leaves. In order to get the very concentrated pandan juice with dark green color, I used the dark green part of the leaves and added just enough water to puree them. Too much water will makes the juice become light green. And the result may be that the cake will not be green as you like.
The recipe for this chiffon cake is similar to that of Tiny Orange Chiffon Cake I made not long ago. Instead of orange juice and water, I replaced all this liquid with concentrated pandan juice.
peachkins on Sun, 14th Jun 2009 11:43 pm
This looks good. I recently made a buco-pandan salad and everybody loved it.
Simone (junglefrog) on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 4:39 am
I am quite impressed with you making the green coloring out of the pandan leaves yourself! I know pandanrice, but had never heard of pandan leaves, so maybe a stupid questions but are the two related?
Kokotaru on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 10:02 am
@peachkins: I’ve found it on your blog. great!
@Simone: I don’t think there is a natural kind of pandan rice or the so-called. I only knew that people extract the juice from pandan leaves to color the rice, dying it green. I used to cook a dish when I had to dye glutinous rice by soaking them in concentrated pandan juice, then steamed the rice and it was very green.