Making HK White Sugar Sponge Cake

I remember I fly with Canadian airline, there was a little bun on the dish, and I tried to use the metal knife cut it into half, thus I could spread the butter on it. However, you should know the knife was blunt on the plane and the bread was so hard and I failed even try to punch into it. I asked my Canadian friend why the bread was so hard and he replied: "It's good for your teeth!".

That's was a good lesson, I understand now rice is Chinese main dietary, thus western people use wheat flour to make bread and we use rice flour to make our White Sugar Sponge Cake.

The trick to this HK White Sugar Sponge Cake of course is getting it to be wobbly and holey.  This is where the rise of the flour mix is all important.  (I tried another recipe before this one and got a half risen cake that went in the trash bin.)  You want to have the cake honeycombed and wonderfully wobbly and squeezable all the way through.

Here is the nice presentation of how to make White Sugar Sponge Cake:

Published on May 6, 2014

By popular demand, dino PJs this weekend! White Sugar Sponge Cake is a deceptively simple dessert with far more flavour than one would expect. It's a yeast-raised steamed rice cake that's apparently quite popular. The yeast serves to provide a complex flavour through fermentation and creates an interesting texture as the carbon dioxide bubbles get trapped by the cooking cake.

You can steam it in a bamboo steamer lined with parchment paper, if you have it, or you can make an improvised steamer by balancing a cake pan on something in a large pot, to keep it out of the water.

190 g Rice flour, sifted

160 g White sugar

8 g Active dry yeast