Hello Kitty Pandan Chiffon Cake

After my first successful attempt at patterning a chiffon cake, I was really excited to give it another try. And so, I baked my first Pandan chiffon cake with Hello Kitty design! I took the liberty of patterning the sides of the cake with alternating brown and pink dots too.

I will not type out the recipe here as it was taken wholesale from The Baking Biatch, which uses Pandan leaves instead of bottled Pandan paste.

The challenge of this technique to pattern a chiffon cake is the baker has to be pretty good at freehand drawing in order to pipe the designs on, especially complicated ones. It occurred to me that it would be wonderful if we could use a template to help, just like patterned Swiss rolls. Artistically challenged bakers will be thrilled if this technique works.

Susanne warned against greasing or lining the chiffon tin with baking sheet as the batter needs to "cling" onto something to rise. The "kay kiang" (acting smart) part of me thought that the batter at the base of the tin where the designs are doesn't need to climb, so it should be OK to line the base with baking sheet. I happily traced some Hello Kitty and ribbon designs on a baking sheet and piped the designs on using the same technique as I did with my first attempt, except that I beat another egg white separately for the meringue used in the colored batters. This was how it looked like after baking the design for 1.5 minutes.

I was so happy to see the pretty design nicely baked and proceeded with baking the rest of the cake. I had some leftover batter again so I let the kids play with it. They decided on piping a letter "P" on the cupcake... "P" for "Parking" according to them :P. After unmolding and slicing the cake, I was in for some disappointment.

All chiffon cakes have to be inverted immediately after coming out of the oven to cool. I had forgotten that when the cake is upside down, the base has nothing to "cling" on to. This resulted in the patterned surface sagging. However, the cake is still soft and moist, and I learnt an important lesson :).

Looks like we have to rely on good artistic skills to pull off this kind of stunt successfully.

With love,
Phay Shing