A slice of dodol delight

Forget tiramisu, marble cheesecakes, black forest, battenburg and carrot cakes. TAN BEE HONG sinks her teeth into the Malaysian Dodol Coconut Butter Cake instead.

AT last, a cake to call our very own. Malaysia’s first Dodol Coconut Butter Cake, designed for the month of Aidilfitri.

Chunks of dodol liberally scattered throughout four layers of butter cake scented with santan or coconut milk layered with a dark chocolate ganache. Who would have thought that the gooey, chewy, sticky dodol would add so much pleasure to a butter cake? Or that lacing the batter with santan would add such subtle scents?

“We had to cut the dodol into little square cubes,” explains pastry chef S.T. Ganapathy. “It took us a few trial runs to get it right. First, we cut strips of dodol and put them in the cake batter but they simply sank to the bottom as they were too heavy.”

Not only that but the dodol melted and stuck to the base of the cake tin. “So we finally decided to freeze the dodol. And it worked fine. We also used santan in the butter cake to give it local flavour,” says the chef who has won over 100 medals for his pastry creations.

Actually, this is not the first time that Gana, 50, has given a local twist to his cakes to give them a seasonal taste. “For Chinese New Year, I made a cake with nin gao (new year glutinous rice cake) and I’ve also made one with pulut hitam (black glutinous rice). For the coming Deepavali, I’m planning to make one with cashewnuts and raisins as cashewnuts is an important ingredient in the Indian kitchen,” he says.

He also tried making a quiche with pucuk paku (fern shoots). “It didn’t look very nice but it tasted wonderful and some of the customers enjoyed it very much,” he says, laughing at the recollection.

He learned to bake the hard way. When he was only 16, he joined his eldest brother in the kitchen at Equatorial Hotel as a trainee. Two of his three brothers are also pastry chefs.

It was quite a scary start for the young boy. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce the names of some of the pastries and the ingredients,” he recalls. “At that time, the head chefs were all mat sallehs and I couldn’t understand what they were saying, with their accents and all.”

But he soon discovered he had a knack for the art. “After six months, I could pull sugar and I learned to bake very quickly.”

Does the father of two boys and a girl bake all their birthday cakes? “Only a few times,” he admits. “Amazingly, all my children were all born in December, a peak period for pastry chefs. So most of the time, I bought the birthday cakes instead.”

But his children still think Dad makes the best cakes though they haven’t told him so directly. The best compliment, he feels, was when they told colleagues in a cafe that the cakes he made were far more tastier and they even dragged him there to give a demonstration.

The one time personal pastry chef to the Sultan of Brunei is not reluctant to share his skills. “As long as people want to learn, I will teach.”

The Dodol Coconut Butter Cake is available throughout the month at RM7 a slice or RM70 per cake. It’s best served with a glass of steaming, frothy teh tarik.



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