Sponge cake Chinese style 馬拉糕

from PM’c CC Vol I. PM steams a cake! It’s not that exciting, just an everyday sponge-type yellow cake, but it’s steamed! In the rice cooker!

馬拉 ma3la1 — Malay

糕 gao1 — cake

I halved PM's version, so 4 eggs.

PM’s recipe calls for 8 eggs and 3 cups of flour, which I thought was a little extreme. I halved the recipe and the batter was a perfect fit for my rice cooker. PM’s units for vanilla are sheets; I added 1 ts vanilla extract to my half-recipe, and that turned out well.

While the recipe calls for steaming the cake for half an hour, I had to run some errands and ended up leaving it in my rice cooked for 4.5 hours. Still good though! You go, rice cooker.

One problem I had was that the fat sank to the bottom of the batter during cooking, and the whole bottom half of the cake was really, really greasy. I think next time I’ll either (1) mix longer after adding the lard, to emulsify the mixture or (2) play with liquid proportions and use oil. PM didn’t specify whether all the mixing was to be done by hand or by machine; I used an electric mixer.

PM also advises us to line the steamer with paper before putting in the batter. I skipped this step and couldn’t remove my cake in one piece, so next time I’ll try the paper method. Not sure what kind of paper to use though. Printer paper?

Time taken: 1 hour

Difficulty level: medium

Cut cake.