Moist chocolate cake.

It's a new year again. After so many years, our family is welcoming it with my paternal relatives up north. It was only when I was a child, dad would drive us all the way here and I remembered it took 10-12 hours of travelling from Kuantan.

Now with dad gone, we have no reason to stay in Kuantan for big days like these.

Families aside, I'm blessed to not be forced into kitchen duties (yet) and I can help out just whenever I feel like it.

So my daily routine goes from sleeping, eating and sitting.

Bored to my bones here with no oven, I have resorted to making steamed cake from whatever I could collect from our local mini marts.

I used a barely accurate mechanical weighing scale (which returns to different zero positions after each compression).

Adapted from Bakericious's Steamed Moist Chocolate Cake, a love at first sight. If you see some ingredients omitted from my recipe, it's because there is barely any ingredient at home and in the marts.

For the cake:

180g butter

200g evaporated milk

150g sugar

2 eggs, lightly beaten

100g flour

50g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking powder

1. Heat butter, evaporated milk and sugar in a pan. Stir until the sugar has dissolved and butter has melted. Remove from heat.

2. Pour eggs into slightly cold mixture and mix well.

3. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, cocoa powder and baking powder.

4. Pour egg mixture into dry ingredients and stir thoroughly.

5. Heat steamer. (I used wok with a metal stand for steaming.)

6. Grease an 8" inch pan. Pour in batter and place in steamer.

7. Steam for 2 hours over low heat*, until a skewer inserted comes out clean. (For those who use a steamer, Bakericious took 55 minutes.) Cool the cake in its pan.

*Since I used low heat, I had to switch to medium heat over the last 20 minutes to speed up the cooking time.

The cake was not cooked through but I figured it would be good enough after nearly 2 hours of waiting.

For the ganache:

90g milk chocolate, broken into small pieces

20g milk

1. Microwave both ingredients together for 20 seconds and stir well. Pour over cake.

My ganache was not runny enough coz of the milk. Blame the scale. It was barely spreadable but still makes a yummy topping. I actually cut down the sugar amount in the cake but milk chocolate for topping still made a very sweet cake overall. I would use a semisweet instead.