Yam Custard Cake with Floral design

Have been experiencing some blogging problems while editing posts lately. The icons for editing text and attachment of pictures are all gone missing!? Quite frustrating since I can only enter plain text into my post....what's the fun in that? And the worst part, I can't even save what I typed! Hello!? Apparently I am not the only one experiencing this problem, plenty of fellow bloggers are also facing this issue. Anyway, let's hope Google can hurry and fix this bug. Okay, if you are wondering why I am still able to put up this post...well, I used IE instead of Firefox...which I'm not quite used to and it has it's own problems when it comes to attachment of pictures too. *sigh*

Have been away to visit family back in Singapore for the past 4 days, that explains why I have not been posting lately. Glad to be back and baking again. :) Today, decided to try out a Yam Custard Cake recipe that I saw on Yochana's blog. Since I already have a piece of yam siting in my fridge, that makes things slightly easier.

I shall be put up the recipe for my own reference plus I did modify part of it to suit my taste:

Ingredients for Yam cake:

90g unsalted butter

90g cake flour

100g coconut milk

80g mashed yam (steamed till soft then mash it)

1/2 tsp. Yam Essence

1/8 tsp. puple / violet colouring

1 egg - lightly beaten

5 egg yolks

5 egg white

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

130g sugar

200ml non dairy whipping cream (whipped)

Method:

• Using the mircowave, melt the butter till it is bubbly. Stir in cake flour and stir the mixture till it is smooth.
• Mash yam and mix with yam paste and colouring. Add in the coconut milk and mix well.
• Add in the beaten whole egg to the yam mixture first. Follow by the egg yolks. Stir well till mixture is incorporated.
• Combine the egg yolk mixtyre to the butter mixture. Mix well.
• Whisk egg white with cream of tartar until foamy. Then add in the salt and sugar. Continue to beat the mixture till stiff peaks.
• Preheat the oven to 170°C.
• Gently fold the egg white into the egg yolk mixture with at least 4 separate times till everything is combined.
• Pour the cake batter into an 10 inch cake pan and bake for 45 mins.
• Once done, remove from oven, let cool before assembling the cake.

In Yochana's recipe, she used instant custard powder to make the custard filling. Since I don't have that, I made my custard from scratch:

Ingredients for Custard filling:

300ml fresh milk
120g caster sugar

3 eggs
25g butter
20g all purpose flour
20g corn flour
1 tsp vanilla extract

• Boil milk and sugar together in a saucepan till bubbly and all the suagr has disscolved.
• Sift both flours and add in the eggs and still well till smooth using a whisk.
• Slowly drizzle in the hot milk into the egg mixture.
• Return the mixture onto the fire and cook at medium low heat till it thickens.
• Remove from fire and stir in the butter and vanilla extract.
• Let cool before using it.

Assembly:

• Cut the cake into 2 or 3 layers.
• Spread 1/2 or 1/3 of the custard filling on top of the first layer and top with the next layer. Repeat if using 3 layers.
• Ice the cake all over and then decorate at will.

After putting up the decoration, it's kind of hard to imagine it's a yam cake....no hint on the decoration at all. I was thinking of tinting the whipped cream to purple, but I worry the colour will be a bit off and makes the look not so appetizing. :-P

Did not do a good job on the decoration, because I was kind of in a rush to meet some friends. So just went with simple fondant flowers and piped chocolate and green tinted whipped cream. But I have been meaning to try out those flower cutter my friend bought for me a couple weeks back. It was such a breeze to use it...wonder if they have leave cutters too? Because when I look at my amateur piping on the leaves makes me want to laugh!

Now lets talk about the inside. If you notice, there's some little brownish crumbs on top of the custard layer. Those are actually brown sugar meringue that my sister bought for me from Switzerland. I sprinkled on top of the custard to give it some extra texture and taste. :) As you can see, my yam cake is kind of "deflated" at the bottom. Well my mistake was to use a non-stick cake pan to bake this chiffon like cake. It rises so nicely when it was done, but when I remove it from the oven...it went down down down. :-P Since I have some extra cake batter, I figured no harm baking it in my mini tube pan to have a small chiffon cake. See the difference now? Looks like I need to go to the bakery supply store again! But fortunately the cake taste good, still soft and goes pretty well with the custard filling.
I shared some of this cake with my friends and they liked it and they did not even notice that the cake was kind of deflated, haha! It's so great when you bring a cake to your friends and they go "Woos and Haas" when they see it. And the best part is when they go...."Mmmm...so nice" after the first bite. I guess that's the reward for putting an effort to make a nice cake to share with your love ones. ;)