Chiffon Cakes

Flavours baked: Pandan, Yam, Lemon, Orange, Banana

I was downright frustrated by chiffon cakes. It looks deceivingly simple but so hard to get right.

After 4 failed attempts, lots of reading, and getting advice from my Cake Master Charlene (check out her beautiful fondant cakes here), I've compiled a list of things CRUCIAL to get Chiffon Cakes right.

All chiffon cakes have two main mixtures - the egg whites, and the egg yolks.

Use room-temperature eggs. The egg whites should not have traces of egg yolk in them at all (else the meringue can't be beaten properly). Be careful when separating them. I found it easier to break all the eggs into a bowl and scoop out the yolks with my clean hands. I'll get cute little yolk balls like these!

The meringue (egg whites + caster sugar) has to be beaten till almost-stiff to stiff peaks. To test for this, turn the bowl with your meringue upside down. If properly whipped, it should not slide out. Underwhipped meringues will start weeping, and overwhipped meringues will collapse and separate - both are unstable and unacceptable for a successful cake. Use a clean, dry bowl. Meringues are impatient and so this should be the last step before combining with the egg yolk mixture.
Beat the egg yolks and sugar on high speed until pale yellow, thick, and creamy. No fear of overbeating here - do it as long as necessary. Not doing this will make your cake collapse no matter how good your meringue is.
Sift the dry ingredients well when adding to the wet ingredients. This ensures the batter is smooth.
Check on the cake only after 30 min of baking is done, and don't allow for large fluctuations in oven temperature. This will cause the cake to deflate.

My first attempt - PANDAN - cracked at the top, was too dense, and tasted bitter.

I'd added too much pandan paste by accident, and used olive oil instead of corn oil (very bad idea because olive oil cannot take high heat and is flavoured. I found out later that chiffon cakes need neutral oils like vegetable oils).

This tasted like chemicals. I had to throw the whole thing away :(

My second attempt - YAM - collapsed out of the pan while cooling.

Chiffon cakes are cooled upside down to allow stretching so they can reach that tall fluffy height. My cake fell out of the pan when cooling, was too dense, and tasted artificial. It could have been underbaked, the meringue underbeaten, or having too high a liquid:flour ratio.

Taste-wise, this was inedible to me. Mum liked it though.

I got an oven thermometer after reading that inconsistent oven temperature might be the culprit.

My third attempt - LEMON - collapsed too. Ironically, even though I had the thermometer, I didn’t do anything about the lower-than-normal temperature I saw on the reading. #thestupidthingsIdo

I guessed it was underbaked again…and in my desperate recall of the process, I think my meringue had slightly softer than stiff peaks.

It looked like a total disaster. But the taste was oh-so-yummy-lemony. My mum really loved it. #foreversupportive

I cut it up into tiny cubes and distributed it among friends. Some thought it was cheesecake before eating it.

At my fourth attempt - lemon again – I became very cautious and made sure to adjust the dial until the temperature on the oven was precisely what was instructed.

Since I guessed that previous failures were underbaked, I extended the baking time after putting a sheet of aluminium foil on the top to prevent overbrowning. But this was another mistake, because the cake deflated in the oven (i.e. overbaked) and fell out of the pan too upon cooling.

The consistency was a lot more spongy, though it remained dense at the centre.

At my wits end and thoroughly annoyed at how useless I was in baking chiffon cake, I asked my Cake 师母 Charlene (aka founder of Cakequembouche) for advice. She invited me over to her kitchen to do a chiffon together.

AND….

Finally! All thanks to her guidance, the cakes remained whole while cooling!

Tasted completely awesome. Real pandan juice painstakingly squeezed from pandan leaves were used here.

Look at that light springy bounciness! I was over the moon!

Plus I felt a lot better about myself after my sister shared ieatishootipost’s blog about how he did the perfect chiffon cake after 30 attempts. That’s amazing persistence. I'm not even close.

I'll only use natural ingredients from now on for my chiffon cakes!

The real test - will doing it on my own again be ok?

YES! I did my first non-collapsing chiffon on my own yesterday!

I present to you - ORANGE.

All thanks to Charlene <3

My sis brought some to work and she texted,

"Your cake is well received by 6 ppl + me!! I think the orange is just right. Can afford a bit more but not too much! The texture awesome goodness" :)

Mum liked it because it wasn't too sweet (her core criteria for the grade of the cake). She couldn't taste the orange until she swallowed the cake.

My colleagues were equally likely to guess that this was lemon as orange. Must be the deceiving lemony yellow colour.

I might use more orange juice and zest next time.

I'm not posting recipes since I haven't done them perfectly yet and still have to figure out my own tweaking of the recipes... and there're too many flavours here.

Watch this space. 2016 will be the year I master all kinds of flavours for chiffon! I can't wait!

Here's... BANANA! It was banana-y enough, according to all tasters. Some preferred a denser texture, but this is chiffon and meant to be light. Deflated, thanks to the oven temperature rising crazily and my desperate attempts to bring down the temperature repeatedly. A too-high temperature caused the overly-brown outsides and still-moist insides.