Pandan Kaya Gula Melaka Flower Pot Cupcakes II

My friend loves my Pandan kaya Gula Melaka sponge and pudding cake as it's flavourful, fragrant, refreshing and not too sweet. She wanted the flower pot design I made three years ago for her birthday but in her preferred colours. It's great to revisit old designs again!

Revisiting old designs means that improvements or more convenient changes can be made as I gain more experience. So in this post I will share two tips that are helpful for this kind of bake.

I more or less stuck with the old recipe for the pandan kaya cake portion except that I replaced custard powder with cornflour for the pudding as it is usually available at all times in home kitchens. Use 1 tsp of vanilla extract instead of 1/4 tsp as custard powder is usually vanilla flavoured and replacing it with cornflour means a slight loss in that vanilla fragrance.

You may use the recipe from this post for making the ultra thin sheet cakes for making the flowers. Thinner sponge cakes make more realistic looking flower petals although there is a limit to how thin you can bake the sponge. How do you get it even thinner then? There is a simple trick you can do post-baking. I used to slice sheet cakes thinner petal by petal when the sponge turns out a little too thick for my liking. This works but it's slow and laborious. You can hasten the process by sandwiching the thin chiffon layer cake between two fresh sheets of parchment paper and then use a rolling pin to roll it flat. Don't be shy to use force to flatten the cake. I did the same trick for the pandan cake leaves.

I use the five-petaled flower cutters to cut out the small flowers.

I tried using small pill-shaped white sprinkles as the flower centers but realise that after storage, the moisture from the sponge cake and marshmellow glue will dissolve it, turning it translucent. So it's better to stick with my original whipped white chocolate ganache (heavy cream:white chocolate = 1:2) as the flower centers. You may also bake white chiffon cake and cut little circles out to stick in the middle but it will be super tedious as the flowers are small and numerous 😆.

Looking sweet and dainty!

All packed and ready to go!

I hope this post has been helpful! As usual, the cupcakes were very well received! Even my friend's mum who doesn't like cakes in general loved this and couldn't help having more!

With love,
Phay Shing