Recipe: Durian Butter Cake

picture from graciekitchencorner

For the next week or so I’ll be posting durian cake recipes, gearing up for the Ultimate Durian Cake post, in which I’ll also share some unusual durian-themed decorations and the best places to buy durian cake in case you’re too lazy to make one yourself.

I am not exactly an expert in cakes. I baked a lot growing up, but I’ve been gluten free and mostly raw for so long that whatever I knew about baking has mostly scrambled out my head through my ears. When I found this recipe I had no idea what a butter cake was or how it differs from an angel cake or a coffee cake or a bundt cake or just a plain old yellow cake.

Turns out a butter cake is exactly what it sounds like: a cake made with butter (aren’t most cakes made with butter? Or am I really that out of it?).  Wikipedia tells me that the butter cake arose with the invention of baking soda, is basically a sodium bi-carbonated English pound cake, and is a “quintessential cake in American baking.”  I guess my family missed this one, unless that fluffy sweet thing we called cake was “butter cake.”

Durian Butter Cake is the perfect fusion of East meets West.  It’s a new spin on a traditional American dessert with a weird, but lovely, Asian flavor thrown in. Where does such a cake hail from? The recipe is from Singapore, which should come as no surprise, as the Singaporean appetite for durian is hard to beat.  If you still want your Durian Butter Cake to have an American feel (good luck!), try dressing it up with lots of food dye.

picture from iambaker.net

Durian Butter Cake
Recipe from graciekitchencorner

• (1 cup) 250g butter
• (3/4 cup) 170g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• (1 cup) 250g durian flesh
• (1 3/4 cups) 230g self raising flour**
• 1/8 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

**Note: self-raising flour is just normal, all-purpose flour with some rising agents thrown in. To make your own for this recipe, add slightly less than 2 tsp of baking powder,  to 1 3/4 cups of flour. Some self-raising flours have salt in them, so if you’re not worried about hypertension, add 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp of salt to your flour.