Making Ma Lai Go 馬拉糕 (Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake) with wanderwithtwo
Hi everyone! 👋
We hope you’ve been having a good week so far. Midweek for us is a little relaxing in terms of work as it’s not usually that busy so today we decided to spend a bit of time making a Chinese steamed sponge cake (Ma Lai Go/馬拉糕) for afternoon tea.
We’ve made this cake before with quite a success and we are always looking at trying other recipes people have put up to see what is different about it. The ingredients are of course different in everyone’s recipe. A couple of weeks ago we used a different recipe found on the internet but we didn’t quite like the flavour and texture so I’ve gone to find a different recipe for fun. This time we are trying the recipe from this website.
Being at home during the pandemic meant that we’ve become our own chefs and getting pretty hands-on in the kitchen. I’ll be honest here, during this time I did rely on the internet a lot for recipes to make meals to satisfy our cravings. We could order take out but there aren’t that many choices in our area and we aren’t bothered to drive out to pick up some food. “Stay Home” is the way!
To start off, what is Ma Lai Go or Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake? It’s actually a cake you’d find on the yumcha carts and it’s pretty fluffy and light. There are versions to it. One being the Malaysian one using brown sugar and there’s the Hong Kong style which uses coconut sugar. We will be using brown sugar in this one.
With this recipe, it requires quite a bit of ingredients as pictured above. I actually didn’t take the step by step pictures as I was on the phone with a friend as she was also taking a short break from work. I did have everything I needed to make this cake in the pantry which was lucky and I didn’t have to postpone our cravings any further 😋.
Traditionally this cake is steamed in a bamboo steaming basket however we don’t have one so we used the metal cake tin instead. The difference as per the website is that I have to steam the cake for an extra 5 minutes compared to if I used a bamboo steamer. No biggie there :)
Popped the tin into a pot to steam and now to wait. I don’t know how many people out there so this but I actually love sitting or standing by the oven or stove to watch my cake rise. When it rises, I feel like it’s a success already... unless it decides to deflate and flop once out of the heat... 😅.
Here it is!! A good rise but I saw it deflating a little bit once I took it out.
It’s not completely light and fluffy like you’d get at the shops but it was still very delicious. My other half and I liked it and literally ate half the cake together in one sitting 🙊
So would we be keeping this recipe? The answer is simple - yes!