Unfolding the Chiffon

The truth is, i haven’t gotten over my cracked and sunken chiffon issues.

I have been baking and experimenting with chiffon cakes till they are ready to come out of my ears. I sent every one of the cake into the oven with high hopes each time, manipulating the temperature, and the heat source ( top vs bottom, fan or without ).

Each one has been a disappointment as they all share that undesirable cracked surface which kinda folded upon itself. And it was really heartbreaking (no pun intended) to break all that eggs into the batter of one failure after another.

I became quite obsessed with it. I think about it all the time, wondering where i have gone wrong. It was during one of these thinking sessions that it finally dawned upon me where i might have gone wrong.*cue for lightbulb moment*

From my experiments, it became quite obvious that the temperature and the heat source was not the issue. Ditto for egg whites beating and folding. I ruled each and every factor till i was left with one possibility – the BATTER. The one thing that i was sure never to go wrong.

Well, it wasn’t really the BATTER actually, it was more on the eggs, or the size of eggs. Being an avid fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum, i register my eggs in grams rather than in units. 1 egg = 50 grams. And i have followed recipes with that law without a hitch. So when the recipe calls for three eggs, i usually pop a fourth cause somehow the batch of eggs i get is unusually small. And that aha moment came when i realized that maybe, there was just too much eggs in the batter!

I scoured the net for another chiffon recipe and landed with this Red Bean Chiffon cake from Happyflour. Let me tell you something about Happyflour. She is the chiffon expert, her archive on chiffon cakes is truly amazing!

And that was when i hit my turning point. For what sat in the oven was a pretty chiffon with minimal cracks!

No more bunching, folding, cracking, ugly surfaces. No more uneven dense layer beneath the uneven surface!

Thank You so much for Happyhomebaking, HappyFlour, Kirbie, NEL, ieatishootipost and bakingfiends and everyone else for answering all my querries!

Recipe (Adapted from HappyFlour) Thanks so much for sharing!

Ingredients
3 egg yolk
20g caster sugar
2tbsp cooking oil
1/8tsp salt
75g cake flour
65g red bean paste
70g thick coconut milk

3 egg white
1/4tsp cream of tartar
60g caster sugar

Step:
1. Preheat oven to 175C.
2. Cook red bean paste and coconut milk together over low fire.
3. Set aside to cool.
4. Sift flour and salt together.
5. Use a hand whisk mix egg yolk, sugar, oil, red bean mixture and flour together.
6. Whisk until well combined. (If batter is too thick, add 1/2-1tbsp of water.)
7. Use a cake mixer and whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar till frothy.
8. Gradually add in the sugar and whisk till stiff peaks form.
9. Fold in 1/4 of the meringue into the egg yolk mixture until combined.
10.Then fold in the rest of the meringue lightly in 3 portions until well combined.
11.Pour batter into a 20cm tube pan.
12.Put into a preheated oven and bake for 40mins.
13.Remove from oven, invert cake onto table until completely cool.
14.Remove from pan and serve.