Light and Airy Asian-Inspired Cream Cake | America's Test Kitchen (2024)

The first is one many will immediately recognize: the Asian bakery–style layer cake made up of lightly sweetened chiffon blanketed in whipped cream and crowned with an intricate rainbow of seasonal fruit, from berries to kiwis to durian.

Within East Asian (and Filipino and Vietnamese) communities, these fruit and cream cakes are a staple at birthday parties and other gatherings, a lofty, less-sweet alternative to the buttercream-slathered sheet cake. “It’s the cake my family has gotten for everyone’s birthday every year since I can remember,” my colleague Faye Yang told me when I asked others around the test kitchen to share their memories of the dessert. “The chiffon was soft, pillowy and moist, and the whipped cream was fresh and just a tad bit sweet.”

One of the cakes that inspired Andrea’s recipe was the fruit and cream–topped cake ubiquitous in the bakeries of the East Asian diaspora. During Andrea’s development process, many of our colleagues in the test kitchen remarked that her creation reminded them of the cakes they grew up eating at parties and celebrations. “When Iworked at a newspaper in Boston’s Chinatown, where 90percent of the staff were of Asian descent, Ialmost never saw desserts aside from these cakes,” our colleague Valerie Sizhe Li shared. “They were such a fixture.”

The cream cake is appealing both because it’s nostalgic and because of its signature dainty flavor—like many desserts within the East Asian canon, the sugar in these cakes is less pronounced than in classic American desserts, allowing the fruit to take center stage. “Something I think a lot of Asian families share is the love for desserts that are ‘not too sweet,’” our colleague Faye Yang said. “This cake embodies that.” –Alyssa Vaughn

The second is the castella, a sublimely plush, velvety cake from Taiwan.

This cake (and others similar to it, such as Malaysia’s ogura cake) is more of an everyday delight, served in unadorned slices with hot tea or coffee or as a simple dessert. It’s distinctly moist and springy, with a fine, tender crumb—a texture owed to a couple of key steps in its baking process.

First, castella cake contains no chemical leavening; it relies on whipped egg whites alone for lightness. It’s also typically baked in a tall-sided pan placed in a water bath so that it heats very gently and evenly, leading to its ultrafine crumb. It emerges from the oven statuesque and entrancingly wobbly and firms up as it rests.

What Icame up with is an admittedly unconventional mash-up—a dessert based solely on my personal longtime-baker curiosity about both cakes, particularly the inner workings of the castella. But trust me when Isay it just works. The castella’s restrained, vanilla-scented sweetness pairs seamlessly with the lush cream and bright fruit, and its supple, cloudlike crumb is easy to bake in a round, split into layers, and build into a festive celebration centerpiece with swaths of cream and gems of fruit inside and out, giving it that iconic Asian bakery look.

Castella cakes are similar to chiffon cakes in that they’re airy and not scene-stealingly sugary, but their plush, fine crumb sets them apart. This textural difference is due to the way these cakes are leavened. Whipping creates air bubbles in both types of cake. In chiffon, those bubbles are inflated with baking powder.

Baking powder doesn’t create bubbles; it simply further inflates the existing ones when its acidic and alkaline components react (first when moistened and again when heated) to create carbon dioxide. Castella cakes, on the other hand, contain no chemical leaveners, only whipped egg whites. The egg whites, sturdy because they’re stabilized with cream of tartar and plenty of dissolved sugar, are full of millions of superfine bubbles.

By foregoing chemical leaveners, we keep those bubbles tiny, resulting in the cake’s delicate texture. Baking the cake in a water bath also ensures that it sets slowly and gently, keeping it moist from edge to edge.

Without chemical leaveners, castella cakes rely on two critical ingredients to keep the whipped egg whites—and the cake’s crumb—light and voluminous: cream of tartar and sugar.

The cream of tartar (a salt of tartaric acid), which Iadded to the whites as Istarted whipping, would help stabilize the whipped whites. It would also prevent the proteins in the egg white from forming sulfur-sulfur bonds and thus make it harder for the proteins to tighten up too much and make my meringue grainy.

Sugar—all of which gets added to the whites after they’ve been whipped to soft peaks—reinforces the crumb’s structure. It dissolves in the watery egg whites and forms a syrup that strengthens the walls of each bubble, making the meringue sturdier and less prone to collapse.

Igently whisked a thirdof the meringue into the batter to lighten it; then, I folded in the rest. Ilined a cake pan with a parchment collar to mimic the height of a traditional castella cake pan and poured the mixture in—it nearly reached the top, but this was no problem, as the cake rises minimally in the oven due to the leavening-free formula and the slow, gentle bake.

Iplaced the pan in a water bath I’d heated in a 300-degree oven and baked it for over an hour.

Ihad berries, kiwi, and mangos ready to fill my cake, but first I’d need to make the frosting. Iwas well acquainted with the biggest limitation of a whipped cream frosting: It looks smooth and crisp at first, but it starts to deflate and separate after just a few hours.

Iwanted my frosting to have more staying power.

Ithought back to my bakeshop days when we’d add a bit of a flavorless powder called Instant Clear Jel, a brand name for modified food starch, to our whipped cream frosting and it would hold its shape for days. While Ididn’t want to have to seek out Instant Clear Jel to make this frosting, a bit of research revealed that a similar type of modified food starch is available in an easier-to-find format: It’s the active ingredient in instant pudding mix.

And indeed, just a little vanilla instant pudding mix whipped into my heavy cream gave it body and staying power without contributing any noticeable flavor.

Now to assemble.

Ispread a thin layer of cream over one of the cake rounds and then arranged as many berries and kiwi and mango slices as Icould fit in a single layer on top. Idolloped the fruit with more cream, spread it out, and then stacked the second layer of cake on top.

Ismoothed the cream over the top and sides of the cake and then transferred the rest to a piping bag and created a border around the top edge—a delicate corral for the trove of in-season, jewel-toned fruit I’d pile on top.

This cake can be made up to three days ahead. Simply add the final layer of fruit before serving.