Chocolate Chiffon Cake

One of our favorite cake is pandan chiffon cake. I have difficulty to make a good pandan chiffon cake. Despites my effort to do some trial and error or trying out several recipes, it seems that my pandan chiffon cake was always somehow shrink. 

A few weeks ago, I discussed this with an old school friend. She gave me idea to let the cake cool in the oven instead of letting it cool outside the oven. 

So, this time I tried a modified recipe while also cooling the cake in the oven. I know, I know. According to design of experiment (DOE) principles, it was a wrong thing to do: Changing 2 different variables at a time without making the DOE table first. I am lazy, hahaha.... Anyway, I did modify the recipe because my cake pan was actually bigger than the recipes I had. 

The chiffon cake I made this time is not our usual pandan chiffon cake but chocolate chiffon cake. I seldom made chocolate cake since I found that chocolate cake, in general, is difficult to handle. It tends to be wetter (literally) than vanilla or pandan cake. And usually it is quite sticky, difficult to roll (in the case of roll cake). This time I encouraged myself to make the chocolate variant because my husband asked for chocolate instead of pandan.

Luckily this time, the cake turned out quite nice. The texture was soft and the shrinkage was also minimal. I was quite happy with the results. What I think I need to improve next is minimizing the crack at the surface of the cake. I have decreased the oven temperature and also used no fan-forced method, but the cake still had cracks at the surface. 

Despites the imperfectness, we still enjoyed this cake.

Ingredients:

A

8 egg yolks

20 grams fine granulated sugar

40 grams chocolate powder (without sugar)

150 grams cake flour

1/2 tsp salt

100 ml vegetable oil

150 ml milk

B

8 egg whites

100 grams fine granulated sugar

1 tsp cream of tartar or 1 tbsp lemon juice

How to make:

1. Shift the flour and chocolate powder. Put aside.
2. Mix the ingredients (A) except the dry ingredients until it mixed well.
3. Add the dry ingredients step-by-step while mixing the ingredients. After all the dry ingredients are mixed, mix everything until it reaches smooth consistency. Put aside the egg-flour mixture.
4. In another bowl, mix (ingredients B) the egg whites until it is frothy. Add the cream of tartar and sugar until it becomes medium peak (peaks hold their shape pretty well, except that the tip of the peak curls over on itself when the beaters are lifted).
5. Mix briefly the egg-flour mixture (A) to make sure that it is still smooth. Fold in the egg-flour mixture into the egg whites mixture (B) in three batches. Make sure that the (A) and (B) are fully incorporated.
6. Preheat the oven (150/160 degree Celcius). I used fan forced to preheat the oven but switch to lower heat when baking the cake.
7. Pour the mixture into a chiffon cake pan (I used 25 cm cake pan). Baked the cake using lower heat (150 degree Celcius) for around 30 minutes and then switch to upper and lower heat for the last 20 minutes. 
8. Do a prick test, by pricking a satay stick into the middle of the cake. If it is still wet, bake it a bit longer.
9. When it is done, turn off the oven. Invert the cake pan inside the oven. Let it cool down in the oven. 
10. Remove the cake from the oven and from the cake pan. Serve the cake.

Chocolate chiffon cake - just out from the oven

Chocolate chiffon cake - ready to serve