My Amazing Rice Cooker

Feeling sceptical about the sticker on my new Japanese micro computer rice cooker whereby it depicts a photo of a cake and vouches that it is able to bake the same by employing surrounding heating system and the 4mm forged thick pot. I skimmed through the instruction manual and found no instruction whatsoever. I browsed the Toshiba website and eventually managed to get scantily infomation on cake baking. It merely gives you a recipe of a cake, but does not delve into how exactly to press those soft-touch 'buttons'.

But, knowing me, I would not give up just like that. I decided to give it a try. Looked around the kitchen, I found some ripe bananas and so decided to add them to my cake. I prepared the ingredients and did the mixing just like normal, greased the rice cooker pot and poured the mixture in. I selected the Congee menu and pressed 'cook'. The light came on showing 1 hour, I thought I could put my feet up and come back an hour later.

While I was washing the utensils, the rice cooker started to beep and all of a sudden, it turned to the 'keep warm' function. What the heck was going on? Then I started to push those buttons again but it did not react. I gave up in the end and continued with my dish washing. Few minutes later, I frowned at the cooker and pressed the buttons all over again. Wow! The light came on and the timer started to tick. I prayed hard that it won't switch to keep warm again.

One hour later ...

Voila! There you have it, a banana cake baked in a rice cooker!

Prior to this, I wasn't having any great expectation of a cake baked in rice cooker. But, seeing this, I was really amazed by the light and fluffy texture. On top of that, it was cooked quite thoroughly, no burning at the bottom or the edge.

Yes! I baked a cake in a rice cooker, not steamed, not boiled! On second thought, may be I can KIV my plan of getting an oven.