what went wrong??

i have always wanted to bake a cake using our newly bought panasonic 1.8lt rice cooker as it comes with cooking, steaming, heating and baking functionality. i was thinking about it for a couple of days until i decided to bake a 'orange butter cake' using the recipe provided with the rice cooker. so happen that sm's friend had organised a 'pot luck' moon cake festival dinner tonight and i told sm that i will be baking a cake for it.

had all the ingredients and tools prepared last night before i go to bed and this morning i woke up around 830am and started measuring the flour, sugar, butter and etc etc. seriously, i have not baked anything using a rice cooker before and this is my first time doing it. after getting the right measurement of the ingredients, i started putting them into the mixer and start mixing them according to the recipe. when it's all mixed up, i pour them into the rice cooker jar spread with greasy butter. the function was set to 'cake' and the timer was set to 50 mins and the baking process started. hoping that it will turned as what mentioned in the recipe, i then went out for a quick breakfast while waiting for it to baked.

had my brekky, came home, baking is all done and i took it out to be left cool for about 2 to 3 mins. after it settled down for a while, i inverted the jar to get the cake out onto a plate. the cake doesn't look pleasent where it sort of got burnt a bit and some cracks. so far so good and after a while i decided to cut a slice to see how it looks like beneath. oh crap!!!! it's not spongy at all and the texture looks like those 'kuih-muih' and hard. the taste was alright where there's this fragrant smell of orange but the texture does taste weird. i was wondering to myself, 'is there anything that i missed out or did i not mix them through enough?'. oh well, what the heck!!

i, then decided to bake another one to see what's the problem since it doesn't take long and tedious to do it. this time, sm was kind enough to offer her help as she used to bake a lot those days. so, with her overlooking what i am doing according to the recipe, the chances of going wrong is pretty low. so, i started everything all over again with the measuring of stuffs, mixing them in a mixer, setting the function and the timer right and bake.

50 mins pass and the baking was all done. same as what i have done during the first baking, left it cool for a couple of mins and then invert it out of the jar. this time, it looked much better than the first one where there's this spongy bit on the top of the cake. waited for a while before i started cutting it into slices and this time it screwed up again!!! damm!!! "what went wrong??". although, it's a bit better where there's a small layer of cake and the rest is exactly the same as before while the texture is still not as soft as a cake.

earlier, we suspected of the mixing of ingredients but now it's almost the same and we just can't figure out what's the problem. it could be the mixing or the self-raising flour. that's it!! i had enough of baking now and i will not use that rice cooker to bake cakes anymore. still oven is more reliable and now i have to think of what dish am i going to bring over for tonight's dinner.

time is running out and it's already 3pm and i have FAILED miserably twice in a row for the day. after a long thought, what about soup? we need a little bit of starters before the heavy meal. well, my alternative is cooking a pot of 'extra creamy mushroom soup' with additional large button mushroom. considering the amount of hours left and ingredients available before the dinner, that's what i did. thank god that this time it came out perfectly as what i wanted.