Kuih Chara

Lately I've been making a delicious Malaysian dish a lot. It's called kuih chara and it's a bit like an egg shaped pancake with coconut instead of milk. The batter is made with flour, coconut milk, water, pandan leaf essence and egg, and is poured into a pan with lots of half-egg shaped holes. The  holes are arranged in a circle, with one in the middle. This is so that you can pour the batter into the holes in a clockwise order, and then take them out in that order as well, so that they're all cooked for the same amount of time. The dish wouldn't seem very special if I left the explanation there, so I'm going to talk about one of the things that makes the dessert special: the sugar. Just before the batter hardens, a little sugar is added to each half-egg shape. The sugar then sinks to the middle, where the heat melts it. When it sinks to the bottom, the batter covers it up again and hardens around it. A lid is then put onto the pan until the kuih chara cooks through. When the kuih chara is ready, someone sticks the half egg shapes together so that they look like full eggs.


When you bite into one of the kuih charas, the sugar squirts into your mouth. Simply delicious!