We tend to think of cake as a frosting-slathered dessert you get on your birthday, but around the world, "cake" can refer to anything from layered dough with poppyseeds to a green chiffon cake with pandan. Here, our favorite global recipes.
Pandan Chiffon Cake
Emerald green, fluffy pandan chiffon cake, beloved from Indonesia to Singapore, is a curious manifestation of America’s culinary influence on Southeast Asia. In 1948 Better Homes and Gardens published a General Mills recipe for chiffon cake. Years later the recipe made its way to Southeast Asia—most likely on boxes of imported cake flour—where home cooks made a version flavored with the juice from pandan, an aromatic grass with a floral, vanilla-like flavor. By the 1970s, viridian chiffon cake was all the rage, and it’s just as popular today as it was 30 years ago. See the recipe for Pandan Chiffon Cake »