'Frozen' Blue Pea Flower Chiffon Cake

My kids including myself are crazy over Frozen, so I had the inspiration to create a Frozen-inspired blue chiffon cake from natural blue food colouring, modelled after the beautiful ice-star burst scene below which I loved!

The only natural blue food colouring around which didn't need adjustment of pH seemed to be the beautiful Bunga Telang or blue pea flowers. This little blue flower that grows from a creeper plant is used as a natural dye for making nyonya kuehs and nasi kerabu, a Malay blue rice dish. I bought the blue pea flowers from a talented lady in SG who grows them and scaled down the chiffon recipe to fit a 15 cm chiffon tin as I was afraid the natural blue colouring wouldn't be enough for a large chiffon cake with many eggs. 

This is the tea made from blue pea flowers. The blue colour is pretty intense! Isn't it pretty?

Perhaps I didn't use enough flowers, my chiffon cake ended up with a pretty teal shade instead of deep blue even though I used a 2 egg recipe. But my kids loved it anyway and said it looked "Frozen"! :) I pretty much liked the unique shade of teal too! The starburst designs on the cake were made by sifting snow powder onto the cake using home-made "starburst" paper stencils. Here's my Frozen-inspired blue pea flower chiffon cake!

Ingredients (for 15 cm chiffon tin. I used small eggs.)

2 egg yolks
13 g sugar
24 g vegetable oil
29 ml blue pea flower tea (20 blue pea flowers soaked in 30 ml hot water)
40g cake flour

3 egg whites

30 g sugar
1/5 tsp cream of tartar

Method
1. Prepare the blue pea flower tea. Soak 20 flowers in 30 ml hot water and let it simmer for at least 15-30 min. Sieve it and press out the blue liquid. *I simmered the flowers for over a few hrs in a slow cooker because I wanted to extract out as much blue colouring as I could :p.

2. Preheat oven to 160°C. 

3. Beat egg yolks with sugar with whisk till pale yellow before stirring in oil and blue pea flower tea (top row, left pic). *You may want to add some blue food colouring here if you want a bluer chiffon cake.

4. Next add in sieved flour and whisk till no trace of flour is found.
5. Meringue: Beat the egg whites with ¼ tsp cream of tartar till stiff peak, mixing in caster sugar in 2 additions (top row, middle pic).
6 Fold in the meringue gently into the batter 1/3 at a time.
7. Pour into tin and gently tap the tin on table 3x to remove air bubbles (top row, right pic).
8. Bake the cake for 15 min at 160°C then 30 min at 150°C.
9. Invert immediately once out of the oven to cool.
10. Unmould by hand and spatula after the cake is cool (bottom row, left pic).

I cut out a starburst paper stencil (bottom row, middle pic) and then used it to sift snow powder onto the chiffon cake (bottom row, right pic). Briefly, this is done by folding a piece of square paper 2 times into halves to make a small triangle, and then folding the small triangle into one-thirds. Then simply cut out 2-3 long triangles from the edges and open up the piece of paper. The cut triangles will become blades.

This is the cross-section of the bunga telang chiffon cake. The teal shade kind of glowed in the light and I loved how it looked!

And here's a pretty slice. See how soft it is! 

The flowers gave the cake a lovely fragrance though you can't really taste them. The cake was very moist and soft, and the kids gave the Frozen treat a thumbs up! :D

I'm linking this post to Bake Along for this week's theme of Chiffon Cakes jointly hosted by Joyce of Kitchen Flavours, Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids and Lena of Frozen Wings.

*Quite a number of people have asked me where I got the flowers. Just leave me a note here or pm and I will pm you the contacts if you're interested :).
*At the time of writing, I saw that Aunty Young had also baked a lovely blue pea and soy milk chiffon cake on the same day! Do check it out if you're interested to bake chiffon cakes from the lovely blue flowers! :)

With love,
Susanne