Recipe of the Magical Cake (Gato Mazik)

When you are ill, yet hungry but can’t go out to buy nice gato pima to eat with bread, butter and hot tea in this rainy weather, you open your drawers and check ingredients you have at hand to make something quick. Something magical. DANG! Only 6 ingredients are required and you don’t need to be Merlin, believe me!

The 6 Magical Ingredients

4 eggs (separate the whites from the yolks)
150 g sugar (3/4 cup)
125 g butter, soften (1/2 cup)
115 g flour (3/4 cup)
500 ml warm milk (2 cups)
1 tsp vanilla essence

The 10 Magical Steps

1. Preheat oven at 180 ℃ and butter-grease baking tin or bowl, preferably square but I used a rectangle silicon one.
2. Whisk the egg whites. For it not to turn back to liquid state quickly, add a pinch of salt while whisking. Keep aside.
3. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar for around 4 minutes till the mixture whitens.
4. Add butter and vanilla to the mixture, whisk for an additional 2-3 minutes.
5. Add the flour and whisk for around 4-5 minutes or until the mixture becomes homogeneous. You should not be able to identify the ingredients as they have blended finely.
6. Add the milk and whisk for 3-4 minutes, with a pause after each minute.
7. Add the whisked egg whites slowly into the mixture using a spatula. The mixture will be quite liquid, don’t panic.
8. Pour mixture in your greased baking tin or bowl then way to oven. The cooking time is 40-70 minutes. As from 40 minutes, check the colour – should be golden and if you like it crispier, let it turn golden-brown. (Mine took 40 minutes)
9. Remove from oven, let cool then slide the cake off tin. Cut in squares or in slices, as you wish.
10. You can sprinkle icing sugar, sesame seeds, grated almonds.. whatever pleases you, on the cake.

My Magical Tips

I did some research about certain how-to-go-abouts because I’m far from being a chef. Thought they might help dummies like me (:
• If you use powdered milk like me, then know that to make 1L of milk, you would need 900 ml water and 1 cup (125 g) powdered milk. So, for 500 ml of milk required for this recipe, just divide the measures by 2.
• You can surprise your loved ones by doing two of these cakes. Make a light ganache vanilla cream, top one cake with it then place the second cake. You can coat the whole thing nicely with ganache… my my… that’s gonna be sooooooooooo yummicious!
• When you whisk the whites, you can place the bowl in another bowl filled with water and ice. This will give you more time to prepare other ingredients without your whisked egg turning into liquid. Make sure your egg whites’ bowl doesn’t drown in the bowl containing water though.

It’s the first time I made this cake. I was nicely surprise by the texture. The base is maspin-like, the middle part is as soft as custard and the top is crispy :)

Do tell me how yours turns out to be!