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