Easy Peasy Apam Balik

(Sorry, I can't help but post this!)

Sweet apam balik

Apam Balik (arr-pump bar-lake) is like a folded pancake with a filling.
In Malaysia, the usual filling is sugar, ground peanuts, cream style sweet corn and a tiny dollop of butter/margarine. Yummeh-ness! If you are ever in a night market in Malaysia, this is one of the few things that you should try.
Reading about other people going to Pasar Ramadhan (special food market set-up only during Ramadhan) drove me to make this myself. I got the recipe from Jeni, and believe you me it is Easy Peasy!
It is so easy, that the other day I made it with the normal malaysian filling, and today I made them with 2 types of filling - sweet, with nuts and chocolate (reminiscent of the ones I had in Jakarta) and savoury, with sambal daging (spicy beef floss).

Here's the recipe for the batter:

Easy Peasy Apam Balik

1 egg
1/4 cup sugar
1 and 1/2 cups fresh milk
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a few drops yellow food coloring (optional)
2 cups self-raising flour

Whip eggs and sugar till soft peaks form.
Add milk, bicarbonate soda, baking powder and yellow coloring, and mix well.
Add flour bit by bit and mix well till very very smooth.

To cook, heat up a non-stick pan using medium heat.
Ladle a portion of the batter and spread evenly over the bottom of the pan, as thin or as thick as you like.
Sprinkle filling over half cooked batter.
Cover for a while to let batter cook.
Once edges of the batter is brown and crispy, use a spatula to peel the 'pancake' off, folding it in half before lifting out of the pan to cool.
Best served warm, but not bad even if it's cooled down

Whipping up the eggs and sugar takes a bit of work because you have to really whip them up till its really pale yellow and form droopy peaks when you lift the beaters up, else your pancakes wont be that fluffy. Having a mixer (hand or standing) would really help a lot. (I just dumped sugar and eggs into my sexy red thing and let it whirl on while I go do other stuff). Other than that, everything else is really straight forward.
The batter is similar to that of a belgian waffle, so you will get a crispy edge to it. I like my apam balik to be thin and crispy. I discovered that to achieve this, I have to use low-medium heat, spread the batter as thin as I can and not cover the pan at all while cooking.
I had used a 6-inch pan, so my apams were small and cut in half to serve. If you use a bigger pan, you might want to cut yours into 4.
If you're making the normal apam balik, sprinkle sugar, then grounded peanuts, then spoon a dollop of cream-style sweet corn and a tiny pinch of butter, in that order. For my nut+chocolate apam balik, I had used sugar, ground almonds and spooned a dollop of nutella (chocolate spread). For the sambal daging ones, I just sprinkled ready-made sambal daging :)(Now I'm wondering if it'd work with spiced mince meat, just like in kuih cara berlauk?).
In Jakarta, they even have apam balik with cream cheese! So Yummeh!



savoury apam balik

Give it a try! If I can do it, I'm sure you could too!