Merdeka Day cake

MALAYSIA FLAG CAKE FOR NATIONAL DAY, AUG 31 

HAPPY MERDEKA DAY! 

To all Malaysians, here's wishing you a Happy National Day! And to those of you who are 56 today, Happy Birthday!

As an extension to my last post on ulam and kerabu, which I wrote as a run-up to today's cooking column in the newspaper (this is where to get all the links to the Don't Call Me Chef stories and the other Merdeka-themed stories in the lifestyle section of the newspaper), I wanted to make a cake using typically Malaysian ingredients. And what better ingredient than coconut (any excuse to include one of my favourite flavours into every dish!).

So I started out with a basic yellow cake recipe (a simple 1-2-3-4 recipe), and was going to use coconut extract for the flavouring, but of course being as prone to mishaps as I am, I reached for the lemon extract instead and ended up with a lemon-flavoured sponge!

Oh, well. I baked the cake in a rectangular tin and then cut out a triangle at the top and "pasted" it to the bottom using buttercream to make a wavy flag shape. 

Next was my attempt at cake decoration. I am hopeless at fancy swirls or sugar decorations, so I used an easier way. I iced the cake, piped out the outline of the national flag design and filled it in with dessicated coconut (have to include that somehow!) coloured with food dye. 

All the elements are accurate except for one thing: I just could not get 14 points on the star! It's two points short since it was too small to fit them all in.