When two worlds collide…

First and foremost, my heartiest congratulations to my friend, Dennis, and Outright Coffee…

…on winning the 9th Sarawak Chief Minister’s Environmental Award, 2019/2020. If you drop by the place, you can see the trophy and certificate on display – I was there the other day but somehow, the idea of taking a snapshot of them did not cross my mind at that point in time. There is no formal grand presentation ceremony this time around because of the pandemic.

I went there that day because I wanted to buy a slice of this cake…

…to see what it was all about. I saw people talking about this onde onde cake, two worlds in one – a fusion of East and West and it sounded like something I would enjoy.

For the uninitiated, onde onde is also called kuih Melaka…

– those springy sticky (glutinous) rice flour balls (something like mochi or 汤圆/tang yuan) with gula Melaka inside that will squirt out when you bite into one, the more the better, coated with desiccated coconut.

I could not figure out what the cake would be like. Would it be made up of those onde onde arranged in the shape of a cake, held together by some santan cream, with gula Melaka inside the balls and all over the cream and desiccated coconut on top? That was why when I heard that they had the cake here, I quickly went to buy a slice…

…to try. At over RM12.00 a slice, it sure did not come cheap, I must say.

It turned out to be layers of pandan (screwpine leaves) cake with cream in between – i was quite positive I could detect a hint of santan (coconut milk) in the cream and a little bit of gula Melaka, so little that I could hardly taste it. Perhaps adding too much of it may spoil the cake, I wouldn’t know.

On top, they had this desiccated coconut…

…and that was about all there was to that onde onde cake.

Yes, I would say it was nice, just that there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, more or less just a well-made pandan cake with a little bit of this and that and yes, at least I’ve tried. This Youtube video tells it as it is and calls it a “Coconut Pandan Cake With Gula Melaka/Ondeh Ondeh Cake 班兰椰糖蛋糕“.

I did enjoy it on the whole even though the texture of the cake was like cakes these days – a bit too dense for me. Personally, I prefer those old school cakes way back in the time when electrical appliances were unheard of and the cakes were not so fine.

Anyway, now that I have tried this onde onde cake, the next one that I would wanna check out would be the nasi lemak cake. Know of any good one in town, anybody?

OUTRIGHT COFFEE (2.290978, 111.820996) is located at 24B , Jalan Lau King Howe, at the end of the first block of shops immediately behind the Lau King Howe Memorial Museum.