Pandan Leaf Pound Cake

I've been meaning to bake with pandan leaves (see photo) for a while. Pandan is a popular flavoring in Asian desserts (used much like vanilla) and has a difficult-to-describe flavor that's both unique and delicious. The mere scent of it reminds me of travel or of kaya spread (a very tasty Singaporean concoction of egg yolks, sugar, coconut and pandan) on toast. The astute among you will note that pandan leaves come from the same plant as the kewra water I blogged about a few months ago. Kewra water comes from the flowers, however, not the leaves.

There were a couple obstacles in the way of my baking objective, however. First, I had to figure out what pandan leaves looked like and who carried them. I knew their taste and scent, but had never bought one before. Finding them in Toronto wasn't really a problem with a little olfaction at my favorite Indian/Sri Lankan grocery store on Parliament (Ambal Trading Co.). I saw them there a month or so ago and made a mental note of where they were for when I needed them.

This past weekend, I went back to the store and walked over to where the leaves had been. Lo and behold, they weren't there this time. That brings me to obstacle #2: pandan is the Chinese term for the leaves (I think), but I had no idea what they were called in India or Sri Lanka. The man behind the counter at Ambal is usually very friendly (which is good, because just about nothing in this store is labeled -- I often ask questions), so I asked him if he had pandan leaves. He stared back blankly. I tried to describe them and pointed to where I had seen them. He said "Oh, you mean [unintelligible] leaves?" I said, "maybe." We walked over to the refrigerator and realized we were indeed talking about the same leaf. I bought some.

As a quick side note, Ambal is a great store not just for their selection of spices, lentils, rice and fresh produce (with the notable and odd consistent exception of cucumbers), but also because just about every sort of leaf you could want for Indian cooking costs $1 per bag.

Ok, back to my project. I learned via some reading that pandan is usually steeped in liquid (like water and/or coconut milk), sometimes blending the leaf directly in, to create a bright green pandan "juice." I had also heard recently that another good way to get a flavor into something is to blend the flavor with the sugar for the recipe. Given the nature of the recipe I was using as my basis (Pichet Ong's sweetened condensed milk and vanilla pound cake), I adopted the latter approach.

To make pandan sugar, I tore up 2 pandan leaves and put them in the food processor with some sugar. I let it spin for quite a while (several minutes) until the leaf was completely broken up and the sugar was a delightful shade of green. The leaves had a bit of liquid in them, so the sugar got a little wet…but this didn't seem to have a huge effect. I then processed the sugar with some butter. In the photo you can see the contrast of the green sugar/butter and the sweetened condensed milk added next. Then I added some flour/baking powder and 3 eggs, and baked it for about an hour.


The resulting cake is shown in the next photo. The top cracked a bit, but this lets you see that the interior stayed green and looked kind of cool. It was pretty tasty -- very sweet and rich, as you'd expect. I could very clearly taste pandan (with a very slight hint of a bitter aftertaste that may have come from including the whole leaves). A couple friends who tried it, however, said they couldn't pick out the pandan taste. They liked the cake, though. I guess maybe it's just a subtle flavor or one people just aren't good at picking out (especially if not used to it).

I put the unused pandan leaves in the freezer, so stay tuned. I'm thinking about possibly using them to infuse vodka. Or maybe something else entirely.