Recipe Description
Biting into a still-toasty apam balik from the pasar is one of my great Malaysian childhood food memories and I wanted to create a dish that was reminiscent of the experience – a little crunch, good chew, sweet corn kernels and roasty peanuts. I switched the proportions around a little bit, amping up the corn and peanut factor. Overcomplicating this dessert would have killed it, so I kept it fairly straightforward in terms of number of components and construction.
Recipe Ingredient
- Corn mochi cake
- 8 corn cobs, approximately 700 g corn kernels
- 100 g coconut milk
- 70 g whipping cream
- 70 g unsalted butter, melted
- 2 eggs
- 200 g castor sugar
- 4 g salt
- 350 g glutinous rice flour, sifted
- 8” square cake tin
- Corn Ice Cream
- 650 g corn juice (shave corn kernels off the cob and pass the kernels through your regular juicer)
- 4 g salt
- 200 g condensed milk*
- 250 g whipping cream, whipped to soft peak
- Loaf pan, place in freezer before using
- Roasted peanuts
- 100 g raw and skinless peanuts
- 20 g granulated sugar
- 5 g salt
- Plating instructions (quantities listed are for 1 serving)
- 1 rectangle corn mochi cake
- Oil for pan-frying
- 1 cm x 1 cm pat of butter (keep in freezer until plating), plus extra for brushing
- 5 g roasted peanut mixture
- 6 small (melon ball-sized) scoops corn ice cream
- 1.5” round cutter/ring
Instructions
- Prepare the cake tin by buttering it liberally and lining the base with parchment paper. Butter the parchment as well.
- Shave corn kernels off cobs. Avoid cutting too close to the cob (the base of the kernel can be quite fibrous). Reserve 400g corn kernels in a large bowl. Save the cobs for vegetable stock!
- Blend the remaining kernels with the coconut milk and whipping cream until fairly smooth.
- Add melted butter, eggs, sugar and salt and blend again.
- Add glutinous rice flour and blend well, ensuring there are no lumps. Unlike a regular cake, it’s quite hard to overwork this mixture as there is no gluten.
- Tip out the mixture into the bowl with the corn kernels and mix well.
- Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for approximately 1 hour. The cake will be lovely and golden on the top and the centre will spring back when touched.
- Allow the mochi cake to cool to room temperature. Flip it out of the tin once cooled.
- Before cutting, pop the corn cake into the freezer for fifteen to twenty minutes. This will make it easier to make clean cuts. Once chilled, cut into 2 x 7 cm rectangles. Chill again before pan-frying.
- Cook corn juice and salt in a pot over medium heat. Stir continuously with a whisk and scrape the sides with a spatula intermittently. The starch from the corn will naturally thicken the mixture. Cook until you achieve a custard or pudding-like texture. This should yield about 450 g of corn pudding. Allow this mixture to cool with plastic wrap or parchment pressed onto the surface to prevent a skin from forming.
- Once the mixture is cool, stir in the condensed milk.
- Next, fold in the whipped cream in three inclusions, being careful not to deflate the mixture.
- Pour mixture into the chilled tin and freeze.
- Preheat the oven to 180C.
- Roast peanuts until golden and fragrant. Allow to cool.
- Lightly blitz (pulse setting) roasted peanuts in a food blender. They can also be chopped by hand. Pass through a flour sieve to remove the finer peanut dust.
- Combine with sugar and salt.
- Lightly pan-fry one cut side of the corn mochi cake using a non-stick pan. Brush with butter.
- Place a teaspoonful of the peanut mixture to the right of the plate. Flatten and shape into a rectangle using a small offset spatula or plastic bench scraper.
- Place the buttered cake to the left of the plate, beside the peanut mixture. Place the pat of butter on top of the corn mochi cake and blowtorch very lightly to melt slightly.
- Place scoops of ice cream on top of the peanut mixture in a 2 x 3 pattern.
Corn mochi cake
Corn Ice Cream
Roasted peanuts
Plating instructions (quantities listed are for 1 serving)