Frankly speaking, when this idea popped in my mind, I was rather sleepy from the early rise. It occured to me that we just ran out of cake for the kids' recess this week. Jie Jie got the last piece of Espresso chocolate chip cupcake this morning. Was gonna settle for pandan chiffon when I saw that tin of Thai Milk Tea in the cupboard while I was grabbing my tea bag for my morning cup. The next thing I know, I was jotting down notes on the ingredients and steps for baking a Thai Milk Tea cake.
Nowadays I am leaning towards to lighter cake texture, much like chiffon or just very slightly denser. Hence egg separation method is the main technique to go to. But besides that, proportion of ingredients and incorporating everything together and cooking it at the right temperature is also key.
To enhance the milk tea flavour, it is important to steep the tea bags in the hot milk for a longer duration, perhaps 3-4 hours up till it is cooled. It is one of those food which the flavours enriches over some time, like wine aging haha. :D With that said, the cake will taste better the following day.
Let's get on with the recipe shall we?
Egg yolk batter
455 ml whole milk
80 ml condensed milk
3 Thai tea teabagsy
350 g cake flour (unsifted)
2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp. salt
200 g semi-salted butter, room temperature
4 large eggs yolks, room temperature
100 g caster sugar
Egg White batter
80 g caster sugar
4 large egg whites, room temperature
- Preheat oven to 155C with water bath. Prepare a 8" by 8" square cake pan, greased and lined with parchment and greased again.
- In a small sauce pot, heat milk over medium heat till you see bubbles forming around the edges. Add the Thai teabags, remove from heat, stir awhile and cover, and let sit 10 minutes.
- Add in condensed milk and stir well to combine. Place the whole pot in ice water bath to cool down the mixture.
- Strain out the tea and discard the teabags, squeezing out all the liquid.
- Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Set aside.
- Using a mixer on medium speed, cream together the butter, egg yolks and 100 g of the caster sugar till light and fluffy (4-6 minutes). Scrape down the side of the bowl as needed.
- Folded in the flour and Thai milk tea alternate, starting and ending with flour.
- Meanwhile beat the egg whites with the rest of the 100 g till stiff peaks & shiny. Then fold the meringue gently in 3 separate portions into the egg yolk batter.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake 50-55 minutes, rotating pans halfway through baking. Use a skewer to check if it is done. It should come out clean.
- Once baked, remove from oven and let the cake cool on wire rack before slicing.
Using waterbacth kept the cake moist and slow baking the cake at 155C for a longer duration also helped the cake rise properly and minimal shrinkage when removed from the oven.
The texture was amazing! I rarely have 2 slices of cake at one go...this was one of them. (Not exactly small slices too!) The butter cake is soft and fluffy, and yet holds it's shape. Evident flavour of the milk tea with that creamy after taste, perfect sweetness for me.So much love for this cake. But that aside, this whole technique can be reused using different flavour, like Earl Grey or even Peanut Butter...yum!
Highly recommended! Do give this cake a try and tag me on my IG when you post. :)
Happy Baking!
