Pumpkin Spongecake 烫面南瓜威风蛋糕

A soft and moist spongecake baked using the cooked dough method. As the main ingredients were rather plain in flavour, I added 1/2 blade of light green pandan leaf to it. I avoided the dark green pandan leaf as I don't want to turn the cake green. You can replace the pandan leaf by vanilla extract as an alternative :)

Yield: one 14cm diameter round cake

Cake mould: 6" round mould, 7.5cm tall

Ingredients

All ingredients in room temperature 

Using 60g eggs

40g coconut/vegetable oil 椰油/植物油

50g top/cake flour 低筋面粉

50g fresh milk 鲜奶

20g cooked pumpkin  熟南瓜

1/2 blade pandan leaf 香兰叶

3 egg yolks 蛋黄

1 egg 全蛋

1/8 tsp salt 盐

3 egg whites 蛋白

40g fine sugar 细砂糖

Direction 

1. Line a 6" round cake pan with a small piece of parchment paper if you are using a fixed base cake pan. This is to facilitate removal of cake from the pan.

You may omit this step if you are using a 6" removal base cake pan. 

2. Blend fresh milk, cooked pumpkin and pandan leaf together in a blender.

As the final blended pumpkin milk will be less than 50g, add more milk to make up to 50g.

You can also use a fork to mash the pumpkin and add it to the fresh milk. The pandan leaf can be replaced by 1 tsp vanilla extract.

3. Loosen the flour using a hand whisk. Set aside.

4. Heat coconut/vegetable oil till you see convection current starting to appear at the surface of the oil (about 82~85 degree Celsius). 

Do not over heat the oil as we don't want to fry the flour.

5. Remove the bowl of hot oil from the stove, add in the flour and stir till smooth.

6.  In a separate bowl, blend the egg yolks with one egg.

7. Stir in the pumpkin milk mixture from (2) to the yolk batter

8. Add the cooked dough from (5) to (6). And mix into a smooth batter. 

9. Mix in a pinch of salt. Cover and set aside.

10. Beat egg white till frothy, for about 30 seconds. Add in the sugar, in 3 batches.

11. Beat at medium high speed at the start and reduce to low speed towards the end of the process. Beat the meringue till almost reaching the stiff peak stage. The standing meringue has a slight dip at the tip.

12. Scoop about 1/3 of the meringue into the yolk batter at (9). Fold to mix.

13. Pour the yolk batter back to the remaining meringue and fold to mix into a smooth batter.

14. Pour the batter into the 6" round cake mould. Lightly bang the cake mould a few times to remove any trapped air bubbles in the batter.

You may add 1/2 tsp cocoa powder to the remaining batter to mix into a cocoa batter.

Drip a series of dots onto the batter surface, and drag a stick through the dots to create the swirling pattern.

15. Place the cake pan in a tray of 1cm-deep hot water. 

Steam-bake the batter in a preheated oven set at 170 degree Celsius with only the upper heating coil for 35~40 minutes at lower rack of the oven. 

After 35 to 40 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 150 degree Celsius and turn on both upper and lower heating, for another 20 minutes.

If the cake brown too fast, cover it with an aluminum foil.

End of baking.

Oven temperature and baking duration may differ based on individual oven.

16. Remove the cake with pan from the oven and drop it from a height of about 15cm to prevent the cake from shrinking after cooling down. 

After the 15 ~20 minutes cooling down, and while the cake is still warm, runs a silicon spatula along the edge of the cake. Remove the cake from the cake pan and cool down on a wire rack. This is to prevent accumulation of moisture at the base of the cake.

You may want to dry up the sides of the cake by keeping it in the warm oven for about 15 minutes. Turn on the oven to 90 degree Celsius for 2 minutes.

17. Slice the cake and enjoy :)

Bonus bake

For the remaining chocolate batter, I baked it into a cupcake in an oven toaster set at150 degree for 15 minutes 😋