Rice Cooker Cake #4 - Steamed Moist Banana Cake (again) !!!

This is my 4th rice cooker experiment to date. And I think I am getting better and better at "baking" cakes in my rice cooker. 

This afternoon, His Majesty (my 4 year old son) came home grouchy, sulking and complaining of hunger. He wanted to eat the piece of cake which his classmate gave him yesterday (apparently it was somebody's birthday), but I have already finished off the cake after discovering it in his lunchbox late last evening, when he has gone off to bed. So he cried and whined and refused to eat his lunch. I promised him I would bake him a cake right after lunch, if only he would eat his lunch. He did, and I had to keep my promise. 

So I opted for something quick and easy, and with minimal wash-up. My easy peasy steamed banana cake immediately came to mind, I have done it twice  in a steamer (once with a cake-mixer and once without), but this time round I wanted to try it out in the rice cooker to see how it works. I was thinking if it worked in the steamer, it should work in the rice cooker, but with different timing and setting of course, since there is only one "COOK" button you can press, and you can't just adjust the heat to low, medium or high unlike for a steamer.

So I tweaked the recipe a little, reduced the quantity of the ingredients to 3/4, so that it would be cooked within 1 hour. Somehow, my gut feelings told me that if I were to stick to the full recipe, it would take more than 1 hour and would end up three-quarter-cooked like my marble cake, hence it's safer to reduce to 3/4. And you bet, I am RIGHT! After one hour, here is my rice cooker cake #4, nice or not?

I am very happy with the result of my experiment. It shows that I now have a better understanding of how my rice cooker works with cakes. Using my marble cake as a "bad example" and my matcha green tea cake as a "good example", I came up with a rule of thumb : as long as I keep the amount of butter, sugar and flour and wet ingredients to a certain limit (as indicated by the good example - the matcha green tea cake), the cake batter will cook nicely within 1 hour in my Toshiba rice cooker. If however, the quantities of the dry and wet ingredients exceed that of my "bad example", it would probably end up as another "bad example". Here I am talking about my Toshiba RC10L-MI, a pretty small rice cooker WITHOUT a baking function and with max 5.5 cups white rice capacity.

So just a quick recap, the original steamed banana cake recipe which was previously steamed in a steamer at HIGH heat for 45 to 50 min, can be cooked/baked in a rice cooker for 1 hour if you use 3/4 of the recipe and the result is almost the same! Marvellous isn't it? What's more, this is a cake that doesn't require a cake-mixer, just a non-stick pot plus a wooden spoon or spatula will do! I am beginning to feel like a guru in rice cooker cake baking! :)

Let's get started, let me show you how to make a banana cake in a rice cooker, it's really easy! Here is my rice cooker banana cake recipe, adapted from my steamed moist banana cake recipe, reduced to 3/4 of the original quantity.

Ingredients
3 eggs
110g sugar
110g melted butter
200g banana (weight without skin)
160g plain flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt, less than 1/8 tsp

Method

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a big bowl, set aside. Melt the butter and sugar in a non-stick pot and set aside to cool a while. Mash the bananas with a fork and set aside.

2. Add in beaten eggs to the melted cake batter from (1) and mix well using a manual whisk or spatula. (You can continue to use the same pot for mixing for the rest of the steps, without transfering to a mixing bowl.)

3. Add in mashed bananas, mix well using a spatula.

4. Finally fold in sifted flour mixture (over 3 times) using a spatula.

5. Pour the cake batter into the greased rice cooker bowl. Press "COOK" and allow it to cook for at least 1 hour. (In my case, I pressed "COOK" 3 times. Each time my rice cooker has finished cooking, it will beep and automatically switch to "KEEP WARM" mode, so I just have to press "CANCEL" and press "COOK" again. It took me 30 min + 17 min + 17 min = 1 hour 4 min in total. This is a cake that works in a rice cooker without the cake-baking function. )

6. Allow the cake to cool for a while, before turning out. (My cake flipped out easily in a split second even without using a knife to loosen the edges. And look at the crust, how I love the crust of a rice cooker cake!)

Before pressing the "COOK" button

After 1 hour 4 minutes of cooking

Note on 14 Mar 2013:
If you have tried my rice cooker banana cake recipe or any of my other rice cooker bakes, I would like to hear from you! I would like to know what kind of rice cooker you are using, and whether you made any adjustments to the method or timing. Please help me spread the love of rice cooker baking! =)