Malaysian Baking Classes in Melbourne: Pandan Gula Melaka, Kek Lapis & Beyond
Some cakes you can learn from a YouTube video at midnight. Kek Lapis is not one of them. The Southeast Asian bakes worth learning are the ones that need a pair of hands next to yours — and they're exactly the ones almost no one in Melbourne teaches. We do, because they're the cakes we grew up on, and watching someone make them properly is the only way the technique ever really sticks.
Kek Lapis: a cake built one layer at a time
If you've never made Kek Lapis, here's the honest version: it's a labour of love. Each thin layer is cooked individually, one after another, until you've built a striped cake with a dozen or more bands — patient, precise, and genuinely meditative once you find the rhythm. In Malaysia it's a celebration cake, the kind that turns up for Hari Raya and weddings, and it carries that weight because of the work in it.
You won't pick it up from a recipe card. In our Kek Lapis workshop you learn the layering by doing it — the batter consistency, the grill timing, how to keep the bands even — beside someone who's made hundreds. You leave with your own layered cake and the kind of understanding a video can't hand you.
Pandan Gula Melaka cake: the taste of home, made by you
The other one people travel across the city for. Fresh pandan for that green, grassy fragrance; real gula melaka for the smoky, caramel depth; a smooth cream finish to carry it. It's the same flavour pairing behind our most-wanted gula melaka mooncake — and in the workshop, you learn to build it into a full cake yourself.
If you've spent years missing the flavours you grew up with and never found them done right here, this is the class that fixes that. You don't just buy the cake. You learn to make it whenever you want it.
Why learn these in person
Two reasons. First, technique: layering, folding, getting real palm sugar to behave — these are feel things, and feel is taught hand-to-hand, not on a screen. Second, the ingredients and the shortcuts. We use the real gula melaka, the proper pandan, and we'll tell you where the cheap substitutes will let you down. That's knowledge you keep for every bake after.
The classes are small and hands-on, the way they have to be for this kind of cake, and you go home with what you made. New to all of this? Our guide to what actually happens at a workshop walks you through the day.
Who these are for
The homesick — Malaysians and Singaporeans who want the real thing, not an approximation. The curious, who've tasted gula melaka or pandan and want to understand it. And anyone a little tired of the same Western cakes who'd like to learn something with a story in it.
Book a class
These run as single sessions on set dates, the groups are small, and the heritage classes book out fastest — so it's worth checking early. See what's coming up in the Hands-On Baking Workshops collection, and if you're hunting for a present, a class like this is a gift people genuinely remember.