Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Pandan Cakes are usually presented and served bottom up, coming out of its cake form. Here in this picture, a heavy crusted top of the Pandan Cake: its golden brown crust broken with a vibrant green peeking through.
This is the cake, au naturel. Neither Pandan paste nor green colouring were used in the making of this cake.
Photo © Jan-Erik Nilsson for CMC, 2009

The Pandan Cake was one of my first cake loves when growing up in Singapore. A lot of Southeast-Asian cooking calls for the use of pandan leaves, from a few blades cooking with coconut rice to its larger varieties wrapping glutinous rice, sweet meat dumplings, all because of the sheer irresistable fragrance of the long slender blades.

The uses of the leaves of the Pandan plant are so rapacious in Southeast-Asian recipes, that it hardly proved handy growing a plant at home because it would be consumed much faster than it grew and more leaves had to be bought from the wet market anyway.

The blades of the pandan plant are so fragrant that people in Southeast-Asia often use them as natural air fresheners, a bunch of knotted Pandan leaves casually tossed behind the back seats of cars.

Some ingredients needed for the Pandan cake.

I remember the slices of the Pandan Cake as vibrantly green when growing up, where a liberal slice for breakfast on Sundays would generally make my day. But with modern bakeries, the homemade Pandan Cakes disappeared from the wet market stalls and in their place, pre-fab versions were sold in a variety of greens – some dark green, some very light green, almost yellow in colour and some others, a spine chilling synthetic green.

It is the wide ranging greens of the cake, sold in bakeries, wet markets and grocery stores in Singapore today, that made me curious and really want to go back to making this cake using fresh blades of Pandan, without the use of food colouring or bottled Pandan paste.

Pandan leaves in the blender.

In Sweden, Pandan leaves can be bought from most Asian grocery stores. Pandan leaves themselves have a delicate taste, nothing too strong, so depending on the depth of green you want in your cake, you can use as many as 15 pandan leaves for a rich vibrant green or as few as 2 pandan leaves for a touch of green. I wanted a rich vibrant green in the cake, without the use of food colouring, so I went for about 15 thick blades of Pandan.

Chocolate brownie served with warm chocolate fudge, bananas and crushed almonds.
Photo © Jan-Erik Nilsson and Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson for CMC, 2009

The first time I baked a batch of brownies, I was in my teens, and a mishap in the kitchen caused the entire tin of already baked fudgy mixture to flip topside, face first onto the ground. My brother keeled over in laughter when he saw what happened, and we considered if we could save the batch by spooning up the parts that were not touching the ground and eat it there and then, off the floor.

Continue reading “Chocolate brownie” →

Chocolate cakes – heaven on earth.
Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro-Nilsson 2009

I love chocolate and with that, anything chocolate. In Singapore, it was a favourite past-time of mine to explore cafés, eateries and bakeries in search of very good chocolate cakes, chocolate desserts and that exceptionally rich, warm cup of hot chocolate to complement the events of the day.

I have specific chocolate cakes to fit specific moods and chocolate cakes to suit the weather or the time of day. And I went absolutely berserk when Marcel Desaulniers’ (2000) Death by Chocolate: an astonishing array of chocolate enchantments hit the bookstores in Singapore almost a decade ago.

In Sweden, I was crushed when I my first chocolate cake craving hit (which wasn’t too long into my stay in Sweden) and found that I had nowhere to go to, to buy that perfect chocolate cake.

I needed to bake one if I wanted one.
Continue reading “A rich chocolate cake, to complement any event” →

Swedish crayfish
Photo © Jan-Erik Nilsson and Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson for CMC 2009

The season for these Swedish crayfish usually begins in early August, where the entire month of August is dedicated to crayfish parties around Sweden. But a neighbour had brought home a large catch of these and they thus made their way to our Midsummer table.

A significant difference in seafood sold in Sweden and in Singapore as I found out, is how most seafood in Sweden is sold pre-cooked in dill marinated brine, so that crayfish, prawns, crabs and lobsters often taste heavily salted with a hint of dill when you buy them off the shelves at the grocers. As such, cooking Singapore chilli crabs out of pre-cooked dill marinated crabs in brine, doesn’t quite give the desired results, as one can imagine.

Crown dill marinated and brine cooked crayfish.

Through the years though, I have found some use of brine boiled prawns bought off the shelves in Sweden, such as making quite good Hokkien prawn noodle soup from the peels. Just add butter, onion and sambal and you will have a broth that is reminescent of those sold at the Singapore hawker centers.

Crayfish bodies are usually 5 – 6 cm in length. These are shelled in the same manner as a large prawn.

Crayfish doesn’t need much to enhance its flavour. One of my favourite ways to have Swedish crayfish is to peel them and have a small pile of them with a little dollop of mayonnaise and a squeeze of lemon. Crayfish meat also makes a perfect topping on bread, and one or two crayfish sandwiches with a fresh blade of salad will make a most enjoyable meal!

And on the Swedish table, crayfish is often downed with snapps!