An Affair with Kaya

I have been wanting to make my own kaya for ages. I feel the greatest satisfaction preparing my own kaya especially for my family although I can't call it perfection yet. Cooking is my life. It is through cooking that I bond with memories of my mother, my father, my grandma and my siblings. The experience is always fun.

Whenever I cook, I will go way back into my teenies where I cooked myself lunch after school. You don't know how proud it is for a teenager to cook for herself. It cultivates the character of being independent and able to take care of oneself.

It brought by the memories when my mom went for her holiday overseas and I am given the task of cooking for the family. At that time there is no rice cooker, only a traditional stainless steel pot and it takes a bit of skill for the rice to be cooked. At that time I am on my wits end when my father commented how long more will the rice be cooked. He must be pretty hungry then and the cooking is taking a long time; a result of a young inexperience cook. But the experience is full of excitement.

Again I built up my self esteem when my mother assigned me to cook for the family when she was ill. Such trust she has upon me is unforgettable. It shows love and trust and I would bring this family practice down to my children.


The other memory will be with my siblings. We were young and cooking can be a class of humor when dealing with amateurs. I laugh at my brother for cooking chicken that is half raw and he laughed at me when I have a slice of cooked egg white in between my chocolate brownie ( the egg whites are suppose to fold in between the batter before cooking but I just dump the whole eggs into them..hah!)

Between me and my grandmother, we don't have much in common except for cooking and her telling me about her life in the olden days. We don't talk much, but we do spend a big amount of time talking about delicious food and cooking together.

I am a bit off the topic but excuse me if they sound bragging. I just want my memories documented down in my blog. Who knows if blogger still exists when I am in my 70s, this blog will be very much valuable to me.:).

Ok enough of the memories about cooking. Now, I want to get in to this kaya. I will call it a sweet egg jam that is most love by Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians. We will have this for breakfast and children loveeeees them! I love kaya which has an intense pandan aroma. I prefer to prepare the kaya myself because commercial ones don't have enough pandan flavor and some of them tasted fake.

I got this recipe from this website  and I really have to thank Nazlina because my kaya turn out very well the first time I prepared it. I have to chuckle to myself that gone are the days when we buy recipe books, search high and low (neighbors and friends) for recipes . Here in the internet we can learn from the experienced cook online and it save us from experiments that will go wild and bad.


Tags: Kaya, Malaysians, Sinagporeans, Indonesians, cooking, memories, kaya recipe