Ondeh Ondeh Marble Cake

We received this cake from a Malay friend who got it from her home-baking relative as a festive gift for Ramadan. Unfortunately, her relative does not sell this commercially, and I couldn't find any other place selling anything similar online despite trying. Still, it is such a good idea, and it should be simple enough for home bakers to try, so I thought to post about it.

While there was no official name for this cake, I felt it was totally like an Ondeh Ondeh Marble Cake, or a Pandan Gula Melaka Marble Cake. (Even from the name, you can imagine that it has all the makings of something really awesome.) Ondeh Ondeh refers to the Malay dessert made of pandan-flavoured glutinous rice balls (a local type of mochi) filled with melted gula melaka (a type of Southeast Asian palm sugar) and coated in freshly shaved coconut. The green streaks you see in the 2nd photo below are the pandan-flavoured batter, while the dark brown streaks are the gula melaka flavoured batter. 
Ondeh Ondeh Marble Cake
First of all, I'll talk about the taste review to explain why this is such an amazing recipe. For this cake, only butter was used, which is one of the most important things for butter cakes to taste good. It was also executed very well as a relatively dense and moist butter or pound-type cake in general, with a nice balance between the egg, flour and butter, and retaining full moisture without any hint of dryness, crumbliness or undesired airiness. So even without the extra flavours, it would have been a delight to eat on its own. This is an important starting point.

The pandan streaks might look like they don't take up a large part of the cake, but they seem to have been very intensely flavoured, because the pandan flavour was very prominent and permeated through the entire cake. These bright but mellow and comforting vanillaesque notes formed the top notes layer.

The gula melaka streaks likewise seem unevenly spaced and not always very prominent, but it provided a distinct salty and dark-caramel flavour. The salt did a great job of balancing out the sweetness, which can get cloying in cakes that don't have enough salt. But instead of pure salt like in salted butter, these came with the extra rounded maltiness and slight tinge of dark earthiness in gula melaka, so it was a more complex flavour than a normal butter cake, populating the base notes with some flavour.

Finally, the normal butter cake medium filled out the middle or heart notes with the a nice and familiar eggy flour and butter, with a good balance of all ingredients.

The overall result was this incredibly heavenly complex yet comforting and familiar party in my mouth. It is a completely different experience from the normal ondeh ondeh cakes out there, because many of them have cream as well, and aren't as dense as a butter cake or perhaps use the gula melaka as a type of filling, icing or syrup, all of which might be more exciting and varied, but just come across differently from the more familiar and homogeneous but evenly-satisfying experience of the trusty butter cake. I'm just terribly sad that no one seems to be selling this currently.

If you know of any place selling something similar, or you decide to make and sell this someday, I would love to know - leave me a comment!
Ondeh Ondeh Marble Cake - inside marbled appearance
In terms of the recipe, it would follow a normal butter marble cake recipe, except that there would be 3 types of batters instead of 2. And instead of the chocolate batter, you would flavour it with gula melaka, or if gula melaka is not available in your region, some other dark and earthy sugar such as Okinawan brown sugar, aren sugar, thick brown sugar or maybe even molasses. Finally, the third batter would be the pandan batter. 

The ratios for each batter based on what I surveyed online are:

Gula Melaka Batter
  • Butter: 200g - 225g butter
  • Gula Melaka (replaces sugar): 160g - 200g (you can optionally substitute some with white/brown sugar)
  • Eggs: 3 to 4 large
  • Flour: 170g - 225g (1 tsp baking powder if plain flour is used)
  • Coconut Milk or Dairy Milk: 60ml
Pandan Batter
  • Butter: 125g–160g
  • Sugar: 90g–110g
  • Eggs: 3 large
  • Flour: 125g–150g (0.5-1 tsp baking powder if plain flour is used)
  • Coconut Milk: 40ml–60ml
  • Pandan Paste/Extract: 1–2 tsp
Vanilla Butter Batter
  • Butter: 225g
  • Sugar: 225g sugar
  • Eggs: 3-4 large
  • Flour: 250g (1.5-2 tsp of baking powder if needed)
  • Milk: 120-150ml (½ - ¾ cup) whole milk
  • Vanilla extract/paste: 1–2 tsp
  • Salt: A pinch to balance sweetness
Discover other pandan or gula melaka/brown sugar treats

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