‘Monkey Bai nian’ Chocolate-Mandarin Orange Chiffon Cake

Here’s my cute chiffon Monkey 'bai nian' with mini 'ju', wishing everyone a blessed and prosperous lunar new year! 

The recipe for the 7-inch mandarin orange chiffon cake base is same as my ‘Giant Pineapple tart' mandarin orange chiffon cake. For your convenience, I have pasted below too. The method to create waves is found in Creative Baking: Chiffon Cakes.

3 egg yolks
20 g castor sugar
38 ml vegetable/corn oil
45 ml mandarin orange juice
Zest from 1.5 mandarin orange
60 g cake flour, sifted
Few drops orange emulco

4 egg whites
45 g sugar
¼ tsp cream of tartar

The monkey and all other details including the sakura cluster and mini oranges are also made from chiffon cake! It was quite a lot of work as you can see! But it's worth it when you see the smiles.

For the monkey, I piped vanilla batter to make the cream face patch in a small glass bowl (11-cm OD), as well as the ear patch in small cake pop moulds, then filled with chocolate chiffon batter. I made the body and arms from swiss roll, and carved the feet from vanilla chiffon cake from cake pops. The small kumquat or oranges are made from leftover mandarin orange chiffon batter in the small cake pop moulds. I used small green stars dragees or candy for the top of the oranges. The sakura is cut from layer chiffon cake. I used dark chocolate layer chiffon cake for the details of the monkey’s face and used marshmallow cream to stick them on. Lastly, I rolled some excess dark chocolate chiffon cake layers to make the branches.

Happy CNY to everyone! Gong xi gong xi! Monkey is coming to 'bai nian' to wish everyone a blessed and happy new year!

Lots of love,
Susanne

More information on the Creative Chiffon Cakes book here. There's a special online preorder promotion (20%) at MPH Malaysia. Thanks for your support!