My homemade nonya kaya!

As excited as I am when I started out making my kaya, I am actually not a big fan of it myself. My precious, Lia, she is. I think I liked kaya too when I was a kid, well, it is sweet and kids being kids are usually enticed to sweet stuff and all. But I slowly grew out of it and whenever I visit Ya Kun, I'd order butter-only-toast. My mom was the one whom introduced kaya to Lia, and she promptly fell in love with it. But she never had the chance to eat it at home, simply because I've never bought it. For the past few weeks, she's been asking me to buy a tub of it whenever we visit the mini-mart, but I am skeptical. Firstly, those kaya I've seen at the mini-mart wasn't in their best shape, and secondly, I am concern about the sugar content in them.

My mother-in-law makes them sometimes, but she did complained that it was a tedious task as one has to keep stirring the mixture so I didn't wanna trouble her. Not wanting to disappoint my precious, I surfed the net for a kaya recipe. And I found some. I tweaked the instructions a little and had one with slightly different steps. The bulk came from here, except that I am not using a bread maker nor cooking it over a stove; I double boiled it.

Ingredients:
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup eggs (about 3 medium sized eggs)
3/4 cup sugar (reduced from 2 cups)
10-15 pieces of pandan leaves, washed and wiped dry.

Steps:
1. Wash, dry and tie up bundles of about 5 pandan leaves in each bundle
2. Measure out eggs, then beat it lightly.
3. Pour all ingredients into a big bowl and add in the pandan leaves.
4. Let bowl stand in a pot of boiling water over medium heat, cover up and leave mixture to cook. The mixture will appear curdy and slightly watery, but this is fine.
5. Let the mixture simmer for 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes.
6. Once done, remove from heat and let mixture cool.
7. You may wanna drain the (sugar) water first if you do not want your kaya to be too sweet and watery. I drained mine.
8. Blend till it's smooth!

This is how the kaya looked like after cooling. It looks pretty much the same (curdy, lumpy and all) during the cooking process; doesn't resemble kaya at all but don't worry too much about it!



I used a handheld blender and it took just a few minutes to get this.



My kaya tasted a little too sweet (for me) when I dipped my finger to try it, but it seemed to be fine when it's on bread; I had a layer of butter first followed by kaya. Lia chomped it up really quickly and I only managed to steal two bites of it, thus and couldn't really tell.