I recently purchased a rice cooker and was very excited to find that I could bake in it! On an island where ovens are luxury items, it is very hard to find baked goods. Most Balinese desserts consist of fresh fruit salad, fried fruit, and the few cakes that do exist are quite expensive. Rice cookers are a common appliance which can do so much more than steam rice. Just get creative with it, and think of it as a sort of crock pot that is a lot faster.

Cakes which are baked in rice cookers are actually steamed and baked at the same time, which gives them a different sort of texture. They are dense, and a bit more spongy than regular fluffy cake, but this works with certain recipes.

This is a recipe for coconut cardamom cake. I decided to create this combo based on ingredients which I had on hand.

2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

½ cup shredded coconut

1 teaspoon cardamom

2 table spoons vegetable oil

1 cup water

pinch of salt

First, shred the coconut. You can also buy shredded coconut and save some time.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients and mix. Add the wet ingredients and continue to mix. Coconut is quite oily and for this reason there is less oil in this recipe. If you leave out the coconut, you will want to add more oil to moisten the cake.

Pour the mixture into the rice cooker pot, close the lid and flip down the switch. The rice cooker will do the rest, and shut its self off when the cake is done. How convenient!