Pandan and gula melaka: a love letter

Every pastry school teaches you to reach for vanilla. Ours taught us that too — and then we came home, juiced a bundle of pandan leaves, and quietly stopped reaching.

The vanilla of the tropics — except better

Pandan gets called "Asian vanilla" so often that the comparison has gone stale, and it undersells the leaf. Vanilla is one note, held beautifully. Pandan is a chord: grassy at the top, nutty in the middle, with a creamy finish that no extract has ever captured. That last part matters — the flavour lives in the fresh juice, not in any bottle. We blend and press leaves every morning, and the juice goes into sponge batter within hours, because by the next day half the aroma is gone.

If you bake at home: never use pandan paste if you can help it. Blend ten leaves with half a cup of water, squeeze through muslin, and let the jug sit in the fridge overnight. The thick emerald layer that settles at the bottom is the concentrate — that is the treasure. The pale water above it is for rice.

Gula melaka is not brown sugar

Real gula melaka is coconut-palm sap, tapped and reduced over a wood fire, and the difference between a good block and a supermarket one is the difference between wine and grape juice. Ours comes from a family producer in Perak whose smokehouse we visit every year. Their blocks are almost black at the centre, smell faintly of toffee and woodsmoke, and melt into a caramel that needs nothing added.

In the kitchen we treat it three ways: shaved into batter for a deep background sweetness, melted into a pouring caramel for our founding cupcake's core, and reduced with a pinch of salt into the sauce that finishes our pandan layer cake.

Why they belong together

Pandan is green and airy; gula melaka is dark and grounded. One lifts, the other anchors — the same relationship vanilla has with caramel, but with more character on both sides. It is the first flavour we ever sold, and six years later it is still the one we would take to a desert island.

Taste it for yourself

• The Pandan & Gula Melaka cupcake — the original, unchanged since the market stall.
• The pandan layer cake — whole cakes on the counter every Friday to Sunday.
• The Coconut Pandan Snow — our plant-based take, no less loved.