Incredibly soft Ogura cake infused with pumpkin puree and warm spices. It’s a perfect cake that tastes so light yet enough to satisfy that craving for a slice of cake without overdoing it!
Ingredients
- 80 ml cooking oil
- 80 ml cake flour
- 24 gr cornstarch
- 120 gr pumpkin puree
- 75 ml whole milk (room temperature)
- 120 gr egg yolks (room temperature)
- ¼ tsp ground cinnamon
- ⅛ tsp ground nutmeg
- ⅛ tsp ground ginger
Meringue
- 180 gr egg whites (room temperature)
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 90 gr sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 320 F (160 C). Brush some oil on the bottom and sides of the pan. Line a 8-inch (20 cm) square pan with parchment paper.
- Whisk egg yolks, oil, milk, pumpkin puree until combined.
- Sift in cake flour, corn starch, salt, all the spices and whisk again until smooth. Set aside
- Clean your mixing bowl by wiping it with a bit of vinegar to make sure there’s no grease in a bowl. Your egg white will not beat well if there’s a trace of oil.
- Whisk the egg white over speed 4 until it’s foamy, then add lemon juice/vinegar and add 1/3 of the sugar and continue until you use up all the sugar. Turn the speed up to speed 6 (don’t go higher speed than this) and beat until the egg white start to form a firm peak with a slight bent on the tip. Lower the speed to 4 and beat for 10 seconds and then continue to lower down the speed every 10 seconds and then turn off the machine. This helps to even out large bubbles.
- Fold 1/3 of the meringue into the thick batter. Use a whisk to fold in the meringue into the batter. Mix until the batter is incorporated. Continue with the next 1/3 and then the last 1/3, switch to a spatula and make sure to swipe the bottom of the bowl to make sure everything is incorporated
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Gently lift the pan up and tap on the counter several times to pop any large air bubbles
- Place the pan inside another larger pan. Very gently pour in the hot boiling water until it comes up to about 1 inch of the baking pan
- Place this in the middle of the oven. Close the oven door and bake for 90 minutes or might be longer. We bake at lower temperature throughout and this really yields a cake that is very soft, spongy, yet sturdy and resistant to collapse. When you force a cake to rise too quickly, it will collapse and shrink when you take it out of the oven. The cake should be dry to the touch and spring back when you touch it and no longer jiggly. If it is, bake another 5 minutes and check again
- Once out from the oven, remove from the water bath and drop the pan from about 6-7 inches height for 2-3 times. This will minimize shrinkage.
- Remove the cake out from the pan by gently grabbing the parchment paper and placing it on top of the cooling rack. Peel the parchment paper off the sides of the cake. Let it cools down completely
