The Lobster Dance

I had planned to do my next cooking post about my struggles to cook dinner in a place where I don’t know how to make the local cuisine, but, in the gap between the first cooking post and today, I have discovered something wonderful. Something magical.

Baking cake in the rice cooker.

What is going on here?!

Oh, yes. That’s right.

In Japan, some of the most interesting inventions I’ve come across have been space-saving appliances and sustainability techniques for the home. My blender has a coffee grinder attachment and a tea mixer attachment. My moven is a oven/microwave/toaster in one. Some homes have the means to pipe the water from the ofuro into the washing machine for the evening laundry–which you can set on a timer to run in the morning for air-drying. Water temperatures can be set with remotes (unless you have a crank-operated water heater in your bathroom like I do) so you never have to waste water waiting for it to heat. Using your rice cooker utilizes space in a way I didn’t think possible because you can literally do all your baking without ever needing a real oven!

Now, using a rice cooker to make things that aren’t rice may seem crazy, but there are plenty of cookbooks expressly for this purpose.

Worth every yen!

At prefectural orientation, my awesome sempai showed us some of her cookbooks, and I happened across this one: Make Delicious Sweets and Fluffy Bread in Your Rice Cooker (『炊飯器でおいしいお菓子とふっくらパン』). If you can read Japanese, you, too, can experience the wonders of baking in a rice cooker for only 890 yen.

The recipes cover a wide range of flavors–you’ve got your standard almond cake, apple and walnut cake, herb bread, but you also have quail-egg bread, matcha and chestnut cake, curry bread. There were some surprises, too–you can flavor your ice cream, apparently; make pudding; make monkey bread. You can even make “scorn” (scones).

Banana-coconut cake

How does it work? Just like baking an American-type cake, but smaller. The ingredients all are variations on the standard flour-sugar-eggs-baking powder-flavoring recipe. You make the batter, butter the “bowl” of the rice cooker, pour in the batter, and set to “cook rice” until it’s done. It took two rounds for my banana coconut cake and three for my apple and walnut cake.

Apple-and-walnut cake

I like this precisely because I can make food I like in a Japanese way. I worry sometimes that I’m clinging to my Western-style cooking methods, but there is something comforting and satisfying about being able to do it with a Japanese appliance.