One of the more difficult aspects of my current deployment is being away from a kitchen for months at a time. Yes readers, the gig is up. I haven't been making all that food I've been posting since October - I made all of those things over the summer knowing I would be away from an oven with very little free time during my current adventure!
However, I do need my baking fix. I've had some big plans to create different treats out here in the sandbox, but there's been setbacks, bad weather, limited supplies, and, as predicted, limited time and energy to fatten up my pilots.
But this past weekend, I just had this overwhelming urge to do something. To create. To try something new. I perused the appliances that had been ordered or left behind by other squadrons that currently litter the snack area of our little ops trailer and took inventory. Two crock pots, a panini press, a toaster, popcorn machine, a rice cooker, a coffee maker... I could definitely make something in the crock pot - that would be easy - but I was also limited with the ingredients available to me. We eat in a dining facility every day so most of the food we have sitting around the squadron are snacks or pre-packaged food. There's not a whole lot of options in our "pantry."
Luckily, one of my amazing pilots went off base a couple months ago and brought me back a strawberry cake mix, so that was a start. The mix needed 3 eggs, 1/3 cup of oil, and 1/4 cup water. For some crazy reason, there were eggs in the refrigerator. I couldn't tell you why, or where they came from, but they were there. We also had oil that's used for the jalapeno popcorn the guys make every day, and obviously we had bottled water. Things were looking up!
I vaguely remembered seeing something on Pinterest a few years ago saying a cake could be made in a rice cooker. Hey! We had one of those! Thus begins the saga of trying to figure out how to make a cake in a rice cooker.
Step one was cleaning the dust and sand off the appliance. Months of sitting unused under a table, left there by the previous unit had it looking sad and lonely. It was just a little guy, an 8 cup capacity Hamilton Beach rice cooker/steamer, who had long ago lost all its accessories, but shined pretty well after a bath. I plugged it in and thankfully it turned on.
Next I made the batter. Simple, standard, add all your ingredients to the box mix and stir it all together. Easy to comprehend, even if the directions were written in Arabic. It was the CRAZIEST color though. I wish I could have taken a picture of the batter because it was the most magenta thing I've ever seen, but we can't have phones in our ops area. It may have been that my eyes weren't used to that color after looking at mainly shades of tan and beige for so long. Think Michelle Obama's inauguration outfit, but brighter. This was also when I realized I had way too much batter than what this little rice cooker could handle at a time. I guess I was making two batches, then!
This was the point where I had to go watch a YouTube tutorial to make sure I don't completely screw this up. The woman in the video I watched made it look so easy - pour in the batter, press cook for an hour, and BAM she flipped it out on a plate and it was spongy and fluffy and perfect. Too easy, I thought. Right...
So that's what I did. The flawless woman in the video said if the inside of the rice cooker was non-stick, there was no need to spray it. This cooker had a nonstick coating on the inside so I just poured half the batter in (put the other half in the fridge to await its time in the sauna), shut the top, and pressed cook. Except there wasn't a "cook" button. My options were WARM, WHITE RICE, WHOLE GRAIN, HOT CEREAL, and STEAM. Panicking, I pressed the WHITE RICE button and the number "60" appeared on the little clock thing. That was a good sign. The cooking had begun.
I was lowkey worried this little rice cooker was going to go rogue and just start smoking or melting or something so I sat by that damn rice cooker as it counted down from 60.
42...41...40...39...18? WHAT.
No clue why it did that. Unsure if I blacked out or there was a glitch in the Matrix, I held out hope and waited impatiently until it reached zero without skipping another 20 minutes and beeped. I was fully expecting to open the lid and be greeted by the most perfectly cooked disk of delight. A couple of pilots gathered around to witness the big reveal, I lifted the handle, steam cleared, and what did we see??
Bubbles. Goopy Bubbles.
OK, so clearly it was not done.
I decided to go one more round to see if that would firm it up. On went the lid and the button was pressed for another 60 minutes (or whatever time it decided to give me). After watching the clock AGAIN skip a third of the cooking time, the timer went off, the lid was opened and lo and behold there was a solid-ish mass at the bottom of the cooking vessel that vaguely looked like a cake if you squinted. I called over one of my friends in the squadron, a fellow baker, to get her opinion on whether it needed more time or not. She peered into the depths of the rice cooker at the days' experiment and together we agreed on 10 more minutes since the top part still looked a little wet. 10 minutes later, we had a spongy, pink, fruity smelling cake. The next task, however, was getting it out of the rice cooker.
I could tell it was kind of stuck to the sides so I ran a plastic knife along the edges before flipping it over on a platter (which was an old cutting board I found). Nothing. I shook the pan. Nothing. I smacked the bottom of my pan multiple times and then I heard a little thud. Relief! Until I heard another thud. Crap.
So it came out, just in a couple pieces. Luckily they were able to be pieced back together to form its original circle. While it cooled, I cleaned out the rice cooker for the second round since I still had batter in the fridge. Clearly the "nonstick" coating wasn't helpful for the first attempt so I brushed the inside with a little oil before pouring in the rest of the batter. By the time I started the timer for the second cake, the first one was cooled enough to be frosted.
I opened the fridge and found some cream cheese packets we pocketed from the dining facility for our bagels and instantly thought cream cheese frosting would go great on the strawberry cake! Ok what else goes in cream cheese frosting...
vanilla - nope don't have that
powdered sugar - don't have that either
butter - we have butter packets!
So I started mixing some cream cheese with a little bit of butter and then realized it needed some kind of sugar so it didn't taste as gross as I expected it to. I took some spoonfuls of sugar from our coffee bar and stirred it in, knowing it was going to be grainy, but at that point, the pilots were going to get what they were going to get, and they were gonna like it.
Frosting done. Now I had to figure out how to make it pretty. Over to the shelf with all the candy I went to look for some kind of garnish. After expressing frustration and clearly not looking hard enough, another friend in the squadron calmly walked over to the shelf, reached into one of the bowls, pulled out a bar of dark chocolate, and silently handed it to me. Calmed down, I microwaved the bar of chocolate in a coffee cup and drizzled the chocolate over the top of the cake. A little fancy plastic knife work on some strawberries I got from the dining facility at breakfast and BOOM - we had a cake.
Obviously I had to take a picture of it before the pilots got a hold of it, but like I said before, no phones are allowed in the ops trailer, so I had to get the cake outside to document this semi-success. However, luck would have it, the day I decided to embark on this rice cooker escapade was also the day of the first dust storm of the season. I was hoping the graininess of the frosting would only be caused by the sugar I used... not sand from the Saudi desert. After some brainstorming, we found a bowl big enough to fit over the top of the cake and my fellow baking buddy assisted in walking the cake to another, unclassified, tent so I could snap some pictures. Finally it was time to present the masterpiece that I thought would be ready by lunch time but ended up being an all day project.
The second cake took just as long as the first one, and it was even more difficult to get out of the pan! But I was able to get it out and piece it back together. Biggest lesson learned = watch more than a YouTube video when attempting something in the kitchen you've never done before, using an appliance you've never touched before.
I will say, it ended up being a super moist little cake, but don't expect the texture to be like regular cakes. Remember, it’s cooked via steam instead of baked. It was more of a really soft sponge, but the frosting and chocolate brought it all together fairly well. Regardless, both cakes were gone by the end of the night, and inquiries of when the next rice cooker cake will happen have started to roll in, so I'm sure there will be another attempt soon. Stay tuned for a potential update to this post!
7.7/10 for taste, 4/10 for execution.
The last little bit of wisdom I'll leave you with is there's more than one way to skin a cat... or bake a cake... so don't be afraid to try new things - you never know what you're capable of!
UPDATE: 1 APRIL 2021
I think I've perfected it! I made a devil's food cake double layered birthday cake with chocolate chip filling and Nutella frosting this week for one of our amazing enlisted ladies and it slapped. Each cake took an hr and 45 minutes to cook fully, I liberally wiped the insides with vegetable oil to start with and the cakes popped out like a daisy! I may get a mini rice cooker when I get home just so I can make some more cakes in it!
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