鸡蛋糕 Steamed Egg Cake

My recent craving came from memories of helping my Mom make this cake when we were young. This egg needs to be beaten well and we didn't own any electronic beater so it was all manual and boy does it train your arm and wrist power!  Being in a typical Chinese family in Asia, we also didn't own any oven and it was actually a dream of mine for many, many years. It finally came through when I got one of my own when I was 24 or 25, which I passed it to my sister when I moved to Sweden. I finally got a nice big oven when we move to the current apartment, so I'm always grateful for the baking experiments I can do with it.

Coming back to this, you don't need a oven but a steamer - which ironically is not so easy to set up in Sweden. My equipment for steaming is a plastic steamer that came with the rice cooker, a deep pot used for cooking spaghetti and a metal stand which I brought from Singapore. It works well for this cake which doesn't rise that much, but not so good for the steamed Malay cake which I will be posting up soon. So if you have a steamer, make sure you have plenty of space for the cake to rise and it helps to have a pot with a concave cover. And the cute thing about this cake is the use of soft drinks to help it rise.

I adapted the recipe from The Little Teochew's blog as it's not easy to find cake flour here in Sweden, so I used a combination of plain flour and corn flour. 

And Mom, this is dedicated to you and I hope I will be as great a Mom as you have been for us. I miss you...

Ingredients

4 large eggs

210g castor sugar

200g plain flour plus 30g corn flour (sieve 2-3 times)

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

6 tablespoon cream soda/sprite/orange soda

Steps

1. Beat the egg with an electronic beater until frothy, then add the sugar in bit by bit until the batter becomes thick and creamy and mix in the vanilla extract towards the end.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Fold in the flour mixture in three additions and alternate it with 3 additions of the soda, making sure there are no lumps of flour.
   
   
   
3. Heat up the steamer over medium heat. Meanwhile, slightly wet and scrunch up a large sheet of baking paper so you can lay it easily over the plastic steam form (or whichever container you decide to use) and pour the batter in.
   
   
   
   
4. Steam it over high heat for about 30 minutes or until center is set.
5. Remove it from the steamer and let it cool before slicing. You can keep this cake for a few days, and you can heat it up gently by steaming or microwaving (600W for about a minute) before eating.