Coco-pandan Muffins: Indonesia defined.

Home made Coco-pandan Muffins

An oven in the kitchen ~ suddenly makes me want to experiment baked stuff. So one afternoon... somehow I 'run' to a friend's room and told her, "Let's bake!". Long story made short, we have several baking experience - from my totally failure first attempt without sufficient tools 'found' in my room; until successful chocolate muffins [off course it's good - it's CHOCOLATE!]. But this time, a rather experimental-yet-sounds familiar taste for trial came to mind.
As usual, my weekend here in Barcelona starts with  weekly vegetable shopping - and as most of any other Asian people in the world, my Asian tongue demands me to do regular stop at an Asian store. With imported goods from all over Asian countries, this store sometimes surprise me with Indonesian local spices or other stuff like "tempe" or galangal. But this time... I found pandan! So, driven only by far-scent and taste of home in mind, I grabbed a pack of pandan leaves and went home.
Some dishes came to mind, from chicken in pandan leaves - to green beans with pandan sugar. Then, as I saw the flour and sugar in my kitchen shelf, I think - why not muffins? Coconut seems to work with pandan - so be it.


Dry Ingredients.

• 150g plain cake flour
• 50g whole-grain cake flour
• 100g white sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 50g dried coconut milk
• a pinch of salt

Wet Ingridients:

• 3 big size eggs - beaten
• About 70g pandan juice [from crushed and squeezed pandan]
• a pinch of vanilla extract
• 2 tbsp plain yoghurt

Other ingridients:

• About 70g butter at room temperature
• Macadamia nuts, crushed.

I added dried coconut milk powder into dry ingredients and pandan juice to the wet one. But I used a regular way to make muffins: Mix well all dry ingredients in one big bowl, and wet ingridients in another bowl. Then I add butter into the dry ingredients, and fold it well. Wet ingredients came next, gradually added to the mixture and folded together. I put a bet on the dried coconut milk, and it went well. The rest is just like the other: put the batter into buttered-muffin cups, sprinkled macadamia over the batter, and baked it for 20 minutes in 190^oC.
Well, I was a bit afraid of the taste when I took it off the oven, as the looks of muffins are a bit too nice. Perfect light-green colored, with crumbled macadamia on top of it, and a nice cracked peak at each head. Yet turned out to be the taste is as good as the looks. Delicate aroma of pandan, savory and creamy mixture of macadamia and coconut taste, with perfect moisture. The aroma and taste.. of HOME. This is Indonesia, defined.

Barcelona. March 2011