Saffron Milk Cake

Pin

It always warms my heart to receive emails from my fellow bloggers for guest posts. I have known Pankthi for a quite some time now, when she used to the “techie mom”. But then, she took a break from blogging and then now is back with vengeance as “Cake and Curry”. I got an email from her asking if I would be keen on doing a guest post for her. Why wouldn’t I? I have loved doing guest posts and Alhamdulillah, in these five years of blogging, have never said “no” to requests that have come to me.

I have been mentioning that I have gone slow on cooking, especially making desserts, though I still do on and off, mostly for family. When her email came and especially mentioning that she would want to start at the earliest, I as usual dug into my drafts. I still have a lot of drafts to go, considering that from this year, I have slowed down doing my posts, since I don’t want to burden myself. My eyes went and landed on this Saffron Milk Cake that I baked earlier this year.

Pin

I really love saffron as a spice and love to add it to my food whenever possible. Some of my favorites are this Kesar Lassi or in shrikand, these meticulously scented cookies, or this lovely egg pudding. I love to add a crushing of it into my masala paal or Habbal Hamra. So somehow, it was natural that my first trial for milk cake would be of saffron. 😀 Many cafes in the UAE are now having many varieties of milk cake like saffron, pistachio, rose and chocolate being some among the popular ones. The idea is very similar to the famous Mexican “Tres Leches” cake but the difference is that the slice is served in a pool of flavored milk. I feel most of the cafes charge a very high price for this dessert, but considering that when you make it, you end up with a huge portion, most of them don’t mind shelling out that price!

OK, so coming back to the post, my first attempt had to be at making the saffron flavored one, and I went ahead with a super saffron spiked dessert, all in all. We took two days to finish off the whole thing but it was simply delicious! To read more about the post and the recipe, do hop onto Pankti’s page! (Updated: her page is not present at the moment, and hence I am removing the link.)

Pin

Pin

Saffron Milk Cake

Course Dessert

Cuisine Middle Eastern

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 3 hours hours

Total Time 3 hours hours 15 minutes minutes

Servings 8

Author Rafeeda

Ingredients

• FOR THE CAKE:
• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• A pinch salt
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp corn flour
• 1/3 tsp baking powder
• A fat pinch crushed saffron
• FOR THE SOAKING MILK:
• 1 x 400 ml can evaporated milk
• 1/2 can condensed milk use more as per sweetness
• 2 cups milk
• 1/2 tsp packed saffron crushed
• FOR TOPPING:
• 2 sachets Dream Whip powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• OR
• 2 cup whipping cream
• 1/3 cup icing sugar

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Grease and flour an 8 inch square pan well.
• Whip the eggs with sugar and salt till pale and frothy. When the beaters are lifted, it will flow like a ribbon.
• Sift the dry ingredients on top and fold in till moist.
• Add the saffron and mix. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes or till skewer comes out clean.
• Cool in pan for five minutes, before flipping onto a cooling rack to cool slightly.
• For milk mixture, whisk the milks in a pan and bring to heat. As it heats, add the crushed saffron and whisk well. Simmer for five minutes. Switch off.
• Transfer the cake to a bigger plate. Poke all over the cake with a fork.
• Keep 1 cup of the milk aside and pour the rest of the milk all over the cake.
• Once the cake comes to room temperature, keep in the fridge for a couple of hours for it to soak completely. Reserve the remaining milk in a container in the fridge as well.
• Just before serving, whip the Dream whip powder along with the milk till stiff OR if using whipping cream, whip with the icing sugar till stiff. Add a couple of tablespoons of the reserved saffron milk and fold in.
• Take the cake out of the fridge and spread the whipping cream on top. Cut into slices.
• While serving, keep one slice on a deep serving dish, pour part of the reserved milk just to cover the bottom. Enjoy!

Notes

You can use any sponge cake of your choice as base.
The cake is mildly sweet and most of the sweetness is from the milk, so increase the condensed milk upto even the whole can if you like yours sweet. For us, the quantity mentioned was sweet enough.
For a mild saffron flavor, feel free to skip the saffron used in the cake, and use it only in the milk.