The photo in the food section made me do it.
The crisp Bundt cake with a bright green interior caught my eye. Then the recipe featuring tapioca starch, rice flour, and pandan paste, an ingredient I had never heard of before that not only made the cake green but reportedly tasted like jasmine, vanilla, citrus, and toasted rice, sealed the deal.
I've been cooking for a long time, and it's not often anymore that I encounter unfamiliar ingredients or techniques. So, a trip to the Asian market was added to our list of errands, and off we went.
But this pandan paste turned out to be somewhat elusive. Knowing the market is always helpful when shopping for atypical ingredients, but since my usual Asian market closed a few years ago, I haven't found a regular replacement. It also didn't help that I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. Even so, I was sure someone in the huge specialty grocery store would help me.
Upon investigation, I discovered that most of the employees were not Asian and were as unfamiliar with the layout as I was. Eventually, I found a can of pandam leaf extract, which sounded pretty liquid and not pasty at all when I gave it a shake. I added it to my handbasket anyhow, along with my starches and coconut milk.
At home, I enjoyed the novel mixing technique of sifting and sieving all the ingredients back and forth between two bowls several times, although I was disappointed by the lack of flavor and color of my pandan juice. My cake looked as vanilla and tasted as coconut as could be.
No worries, though. I modified the recipe to make a tiny cake, one-third the size of the one that caught my eye, and when my mail-order pandan paste arrives?
I will give it another go.
(Not my cake. Yet!)
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