Indonesian Cheesecake aka Bolu Keju

This Indonesian cheesecake is one of many dishes that always reminds me of mom and my childhood. Mom makes this cake ,although not necessarily with grated cheddar topping, for our (the kids’) birthdays and she does now for my nieces’ birthdays 🙂 As with many Indonesian cakes, this cake recipe use many egg yolks. It may not as crazy as Lapis Legit or Lapis Surabaya that use up to 30 egg yolks per recipe, but a dozen is fairly significant amount for me 🙂 I always steer away from recipes where more than 8 eggs are involved, just the thought that there are chances the cake will not turn up good or even edible than those ingredients will just be waste and that is horrifying to me. Due to numerous amount of eggs used, this cake may not be the healthiest cake around, so please enjoy responsibly 🙂

The texture of this cake is of course very soft, however not airy like sponge cake where we used a lot of egg whites as well. It is a little dense and yet still very soft and moist. So after putting this aside for a very long time, I finally braved myself to give it a try. The way mom bakes this cake is she did three recipes to make three layers of the cake on round pan (I think they are 30 cm in diameter). I just made one recipe for a smaller pan (18 cm x 18 cm) and I even split the batter into two pans for different color/flavor 😛

Here is the recipe as per mom’s cook book:

• 9 egg yolks
• 3 whole eggs
• 120 grams of sugar
• 100 grams of flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• 200 grams of butter, melted

Preheat your oven to 180 C.

Beat the eggs until pale, fluffy, and the beater leaves track on the batter then gradually add the sugar a little at a time. After all the sugar are mixed completely with the egg batter, add the melted butter gradually again while mixing until all incorporated. Make sure the scrape the bottom and side of your mixing bowl to make sure no melted butter sitting unincorporated with the batter. Then add the the shifted flour with baking powder a little at a time and mix well – do not over mix the batter.

Pour the batter into a baking pan that has already greased/lined with baking sheets. Bake until the cake is cooked, use toothpick test to determine if the cake is fully cooked.

** I split my batter into two pans, into one of them I added some mocha paste and the other I left as is. Because of the splitting into two pans, mine didn’t take long at all, from memory it was approximately 20 – 25 minutes.

** I used strawberry jam as “glue” for the two cake layers then spread buttercream on the top surface and generous amount of grated cheddar. Many people also cover the four sides of the cake with buttercream and grated cheddar, which I thought would be too much since my cake is tiny.

** I also added a splash of rum into the buttercream for a nice kick ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪