Light and airy with a beautiful pastel green inside and refreshing Southeast Asian flavors, this delightful pandan chiffon cake recipe is the perfect afternoon treat. I’ll show you how to make your own perfect pandan chiffon cake quick and easy with just a few basic ingredients and a rice cooker!
What is Pandan Chiffon Cake?
In my recent post about how to make your own pandan extract, I talked about how pandan is a popular flavor used in both sweet and savory dishes throughout Southeast Asia. I’ve been growing my own pandan leaves in the garden lately and have been a little obsessed with developing all sorts of delicious pandan recipes! And this airy pandan chiffon cake is one of them.
The cake base itself is not that different from the original chiffon cake, but the refreshing flavor of the pandan juice along with the pastel green color of the interiors make this pandan chiffon cake a uniquely Southeast Asian dish worth remembering!
Chiffon Cake in the Rice Cooker
If you’re Asian or eat a lot of Asian cuisines, you probably have a rice cooker in your home. The humble rice cooker is simply unbeatable when it comes to making perfectly cooked rice, but did you know there’s so much more you can cook with it?
This pandan chiffon cake is made super quick and easy in the rice cooker. I love making it this way because not only does it yield a wonderfully fluffy chiffon cake, but it also requires much less clean up! There’s no need for cake pans, oven settings, or even a timer. Just set your rice cooker to the “cake” setting and let it cook until perfect.
If your rice cooker doesn’t have a cake setting, don’t worry. Simply set a timer for around 30 minutes, checking the cake’s doneness every ten minutes or so. If the rice cooker switches back to the “warm” setting, simply switch it back to “cook”. You’ll know the cake is ready when you poke a skewer through it and the skewer comes out clean.
How to Serve Your Pandan Chiffon Cake
Different countries serve their pandan chiffon cake in different ways. In Indonesia and Singapore, it’s served as is. A slice of pandan chiffon cake is a popular treat in cafes and bakeries, often eaten with a cup of coffee or tea on the side. This is the way we like to have it at home as well.
In the Philippines, pandan cake comes with young coconut flavored icing and strips of young coconut meat. If you have any of these (or even regular coconut icing and meat), you can give it a try!
In Vietnam, while the pandan chiffon cake is also popular, it’s often overshadowed by pandan honeycomb cake – a pandan flavored cake with a mesmerizing honeycomb-patterned interior and delightful springy texture. You can find the recipe for that on my blog too.
I hope you enjoy my pandan chiffon cake recipe. If you make it, be sure to let me know what you think! I would love to hear from you.
Easy Rice Cooker Pandan Chiffon Cake | Bánh Bông Lan Lá Dứa Recipe
Ingredients
- 100 grams Cake Flour
- 40 grams Sugar
- 1 tsp Baking Powder
- ¼ tsp Himalayan Pink Salt or Kosher Salt
- 40 grams Coconut Milk
- 50 grams Coconut Oil
- 30 ml Pandan Juice (5 Fresh Pandan leaves blended with ¼ cup of Water and strain – use 30 ml of that Pandan Juice)
- 4 Egg Yolks
- 4 Egg Whites
- 40 grams Sugar
- ½ tsp Cream of Tartar
Instructions
- Blend 5 fresh/frozen Pandan leaves with ¼ cup of water.
- Strain and keep 30 ml for the recipe.
- Alternatively, mix 1 tsp of Pandan Extract with 30 ml of water.
- Mix 40 grams of sugar with 4 egg yolks.
- Add ¼ tsp of Salt and 50 grams of Coconut Oil – mix.
- Add Pandan Juice and Coconut Milk – mix.
- Sieve Cake Flour and Baking Powder and add to wet mixture – mix well.
- In a separate bowl, whisk egg whites until foamy.
- Add cream of tartar and whisk.
- While whisking, gradually add the Sugar. Continue to whisk until your egg whites are nice and stiff.
- Carefully fold egg whites into your other wet mixture – do this gradually.
- Grease your rice cooker pot – I spray it with Coconut Oil.
- Tab your pot a couple of times to remove the air bubbles.
- Use the “cake” setting in your rice cooker.