I came by a book titled ‘Steam Cake and Kuih Muih’ published by Famous Cuisine Publisher Sdn Bhd and flipping through the contents and pretty pictures . found that the recipes seemed pretty do-able, steamed cakes has it’s attractions- the texture, the taste is different from oven baked cakes.
I had my eyes set on the Steamed Longan cakes ( main reasons being I have most of the ingredients that was mentioned in the recipe and I like longan ) so, with that in mind, I trot to the mini market and bought some eggs ( wah..it’s 40cents/ egg, and it’s just the regular sized eggs lehh) ..i think I will see if I can rear some chickens…
The recipe called for :
4 eggs
90g castor sugar
70g brown sugar
50g dried longan 
100ml water
150g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp soda bicarbonate
15ml corn oil
Method :
1. Melt brown sugar and water in a pot over a slow fire, add in dried longan, continue to cook for 5 minutes. Leave to cool, remove the longan and cut into smaller pieces. Set aside the syrup.
2. Sift together flour, soda bicarbonate and baking powder. Set aside
3. Whisk eggs and castor sugar until light and creamy
4. Gradually fold in the sifted flour, then add in the longan, the syrup and corn oil. Mix well to get a smooth batter. (I found the batter a bit watery)
5. Spoon batter into cup cake moulds, steam in preheated steamer for ~ 30 minutes.
Note : I didn’t have any brown sugar, so I used castor sugar instead. For dried longan, I guess you can substitute that with any other dried fruits like apricots, raisin etc lah.. I halved the ingredients above and that yielded 8 cupcakes, so the full recipe as given above should make ~ 16 cupcakes .
Preparation took around 30 minutes, and the steaming was 30 minutes, so everything done in 1 hours’ time,
The verdict :
Pretty good !
NB: For those of you that never tried longan in cakes, please try using it, as the flavour ( as opposed to raisins which is sooo traditional ) is pretty unique.
