Okay, that title is only there because it’s almost Halloween. This isn’t that spooky, but what you see here is a green cake, made without dyes or magic spells or any other kind of tomfoolery. That pallor is all natural, baby, thanks to the pandan leaf.

Pandan, also called screwpine, is a common “flavoring agent” (meaning it infuses things, but you don’t really eat the leaf itself — kind of like a bay leaf) in Southeast Asian cuisine, and one of my favorite pandan employments is in pandan chiffon cake. It’s fragrant in the way that excellent Jasmine rice is fragrant, and just a little coconut-y. In fact, cooks often bump up the coconut-ish flavor with additional coconut milk, which I definitely did here.

Cooking with whole pandan can be kind of an ordeal, but it is absolutely worth the effort if you’re always looking for a barely-sweet, light, almost angel food-like cake to have in the mornings with your coffee or tea. If your city has a big Asian grocery store — preferably a Chinese or Vietnamese one because my Japanese supermarket didn’t have this, but the Chinese one did — go there and look around the frozen vegetables section; that’s where I found the frozen pandan leaves I used here. With whole pandan, you can get that beautiful green hue without food coloring! Pandan extract can also work when whole pandan isn’t available, but be warned that it can also be a bit cloying and artificial-tasting. Bummer.

The trick is cut your pandan leaves up into half-inch pieces, then blitz it all in a blender with some water. The recipe I followed (linked below) said to only use a few tablespoons of water, but my blender pitched a fit over that so I ended up using about a cup of water for the entire thing and still got plenty of pandan flavor and green coloring. Read more

This was a productive weekend. I finally hung up the the little raincloud mobile I made…

…along with two paper lamps from the Japanese supermarket.

Then, I drilled drainage holes into my darling Anthropologie “Perch planters.” The store had a 20% off sale recently, and I checked out with a whole mess of fish-shaped planters because that’s the kind of person I am.

Aside: why don’t more cute planters come with drainage holes? Having those makes a huge difference in plant mortality. I mean, let’s not even talk about the Terrible Thyme Tragedy of 2013, or the Great Succulent Massacre of 2014 — for me, the grief is still too near.

Planters need outlets for water runoff or else you risk overwatering your plants (which will kill them), or underwatering them for fear of overwatering (which will also kill them). Now all the planters I buy get drainage holes punched into them.

I don’t have a clever segue planned, so I’ll just abruptly drag us back to the point of this post: I also spent the weekend baking a tasty carrot cake. Read more

My birthday was this past weekend, and I had a great time thanks to a wonderful dinner hosted by my friends and coworkers at Il Terrazzo Carmine (if you want the best clams and linguine in the city, that is the place). I also had boxes of treats sent to my home from my out-of-town friends and family, and who doesn’t like mail, especially if said mail contains cookies?!

I’m sure my heart did a Grinch-style “grow three sizes” thing, which was welcomed after a particularly rough week. So in case any of my Houston, Seattle, Atlanta, wherever lovelies are reading this — thank you from the bottom of my heart for making all of my years wonderful, and I look forward to spending yet another one with all of you.

Now that we have the sentimental crap out of the way, let’s get down to the really important business: cake.

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