Pandan is not a garnish. Gula melaka is not brown sugar with a nicer name. Both are difficult ingredients that behave badly in a French pastry kitchen, and both are worth the trouble.
This is what we work with at Elevete, and why our Malaysian-flavour cakes taste the way they do. If you are shopping rather than reading, the short version is at the bottom: what to order, for how many people, and how much notice we need.
Malaysian flavour, French technique
The technique is French. Genoise sponges, mousses set with gelatine rather than cornflour, buttercream emulsified properly instead of creamed with icing sugar. The flavour is local.
Those two things fight each other more than you would expect. Pandan extract, the bottled green kind, survives heat and gives you the colour people expect, but it tastes like nothing. Real pandan leaf gives you the aroma and almost no colour, and it fades if you bake it too long or hold it too warm. Gula melaka has water in it and a smoke note that turns bitter under heat, so it cannot simply replace sugar in a recipe by weight.
Every cake below is our answer to one of those problems. That is the entire premise.
The four flavours we build with
Pandan
We use real leaves, blitzed and pressed, in the sponge. It is a paler green than the pandan chiffon you grew up with, which is the honest colour of leaf rather than dye. The aroma is stronger and the flavour lasts longer on the palate.
Our Locale pandan gula melaka cake is the bestseller in this group at RM120, and there is a 5-inch mini version at RM90 if you are feeding four or five people rather than ten.
Gula melaka
Palm sugar from the coconut flower, boiled down and set into discs. Good gula melaka is smoky and slightly salty, not just sweet. We cook it into a buttercream rather than dusting it on top, which means it has to be reduced first so the extra water does not split the emulsion.
Paired with pandan it is the most Malaysian thing on our menu. If you want it in a format built for sharing rather than slicing, the square pandan gula melaka cake bites at RM125 are the same flavour cut into portions you can hand round a room.
Ondeh-ondeh
The whole appeal of ondeh-ondeh is the moment the gula melaka bursts. That is difficult to keep in a tart, because a liquid centre soaks a pastry shell from the inside within hours. Our ondeh-ondeh tart at RM118 solves it with a sealed shell and a set-but-flowing centre, finished with fresh grated coconut.
Coffee and kuih
The pandan coffee tart at RM118 is our local answer to a coffee éclair: pandan pastry cream against a dark local roast, which is bitter enough to stop the pandan reading as dessert-sweet.
And then there is the kuih table, which is the hardest of the lot, because kuih is a category rather than a flavour.
Merdeka and Malaysia Day: the Muhibbah cake
Muhibbah is the feeling of a table everyone can eat from. We built a cake around it: an entire kuih spread assembled into one thing.
A pandan sponge made with real leaves, layered with gula melaka buttercream and coconut mousse, finished the way an open house is finished. Ondeh-ondeh truffles. Cubes of kuih talam. Kuih bahulu straight off the mould. Chocolate coconut shells pooled with warm gula melaka sauce.
It serves 20 to 30, which makes it an office-floor cake rather than a family cake, and it costs RM288. Every one is decorated by hand, so this is the one item in the range that needs one day's notice.
It is built for both national days. Merdeka falls on Monday 31 August 2026, Malaysia's 69th, and Malaysia Day on Wednesday 16 September. Two occasions, three weeks apart, and the same cake works for both.
See the Muhibbah cake, or browse the full Merdeka and Malaysia Day collection.
What to order, by occasion
- An office floor, 20 to 30 people. The Muhibbah kuih cake, RM288. One day's notice.
- A family table, 8 to 12 people. The Locale pandan gula melaka cake, RM120.
- Four or five people. The 5-inch Locale mini, RM90.
- Something to hand round, no plates. Square pandan gula melaka cake bites, RM125.
- A gift for one or two. The ondeh-ondeh tart or pandan coffee tart, RM118 each.
Ordering, delivery and lead time
We deliver free across Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya and Selangor.
Everything in the range is available for same-day delivery except the Muhibbah cake, which is hand-decorated and needs a day.
Both national days fall midweek this year, which affects when offices actually celebrate:
- Merdeka, Monday 31 August. Most offices mark it on Friday 28 August. Order the Muhibbah cake by Thursday 27 August. For Merdeka Day itself, order by Sunday 30 August.
- Malaysia Day, Wednesday 16 September. Order the Muhibbah cake by Tuesday 15 September.
We deliver on both public holidays. Pick your date and time slot at checkout. Everything else in the range can be ordered on the day itself.
We are halal-certified. If you want to check that for yourself rather than take our word for it, here is how to verify any bakery on the public register.
Why we make these at all
Malaysian flavours in a patisserie usually arrive as a novelty: one pandan item on an otherwise European menu, priced as a curiosity. We would rather they were the part of the menu we are known for. Pandan and gula melaka are genuinely hard to work with at this standard, which is exactly the argument for doing it properly rather than not at all.
These are on the menu year-round, not only in August. The full range lives in our Malaysian Flavour Series, alongside the two-tier Locale cake and the mix-and-match boxes we build for offices.
Written by Pak Win, Chef Entertainment Officer (CEO) at Elevete Patisserie, and the reason there is real pandan leaf in the kitchen instead of a bottle.