“I often have to tell people it’s not that sweet,” says self-taught baker Irene Pabellano, founder of Pastries On Demand and creator of the royal purple-hued ube flan cake. “It’s similar to leche flan.”
Pabellano’s eye-popping cake, christened Death By Ube, was hard to miss when it popped up on my social feeds. The impossibly purple confection, one part chiffon cake and one part flan, is similar to a chocoflan; however, unlike the popular Mexican cake, which is baked together in one pan, Pabellano bakes her cake and flan separately, bringing them together once cooled. She then gilds it with a drizzle of ube ganache on top.
“If you mix the two, the texture comes out different,” she says. “I like my flan smooth and creamy and my chiffon cake to be soft and lovely.”
For the uninitiated, ube, a staple of Filipino and Hawaiian cuisines, is a purple yam that’s often boiled and mashed then used in a variety of dishes ranging from sweet to savory. Ube is noted for its nutty vanilla-like flavor in addition to its deep violet color.
In recent years — and thanks, in part, to Instagram — ube has taken off in other parts of the United States: Yum Yams, an annual ube festival in San Francisco, has lines stretching for blocks with people vying to taste the many ube concoctions. Long Beach also just held its own ube festival. Ditto for New York City.
But you don’t need to queue up at festivals to get your paws on this treat. Pabellano’s Pastries On Demand menu featuring Death By Ube can be found at myriad of North County O.C. locations, like Faka’s Island Grill at 4th Street Market and Munch Box inside Collective 2one9, both of which can be found in Santa Ana.
In addition to Death By Ube, Pabellano, a native Filipina who operates in Santa Ana, also makes matcha tres leches, ube…
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