On Baking in China

Like many things in China, baking can be a real challenge. Historically the Chinese don’t bake, so ovens are a completely unnecessary appliance. Therefore, I, like my neighbors, don’t have an oven in my kitchen. Luckily, I have a small toaster oven in my apartment. It works well for toast, garlic bread, cookies, and other small toasting needs, but falls far short of all of my oven desires.

Baking is one of my hobbies in the US and, due to my lack of an oven, I spent the first several months in China baked good-less. Sure, I enjoyed a steamed cake now and then, but when I say baked good, I mean baked good. Recently, however, I discovered the joys of the rice cooker, an appliance that, believe it or not, is common in Chinese kitchens. I’ve used it to make a Rachael Ray rice cooker meal (the recipe for which can be found here) and, more interestingly, a lovely Neapolitan marble cake (here’s that recipe). The cake was a real long shot, but it worked out amazingly well.

Baking in a rice cooker is a real guessing game. First of all it’s hard to find all the ingredients necessary for baked goods. Vanilla, for example, is nowhere to be found. And just forget about icing. Secondly, I have absolutely no idea what the cooking temperature is. The temperature options on my rice cooker are “warm” and “cook rice,” which aren’t as descriptive as, say, numbers. As a result, I just throw the batter in and hope for the best. Finally, the cooker switches from “warm” and “cook rice” at will. If it detects that there is no longer water in the pan “cooking” the “rice,” it shuts itself down to “warm.” And although I can wedge a clothespin under the switch, it ends up burning the underside of the cake if I do. I found it’s just better if I let the temperature vary greatly during the cooking, rather than burn the entire bottom of my cake. So after pushing the button up and it popping down, me pushing the button back up, it popping back down again several times, the cake finally bakes the whole way through.

The problems don’t end when the cake is finally thoroughly baked. Good luck finding a cooling rack. Thus, as you see in the pictures, chopsticks step up and fill the void nicely.

There are so many things about the US that are able to be recreated in central China with a little creativity. The longer I’m here, the more I’m able to do. On one hand, it makes me sad when I realize that I’ll only be here for a few months. On the other, I remember how much easier, and more delicious, all of my baked-goods are going to be back in North America and I get excited. Muffins, icing, cupcakes, breads, cakes, cookies, baked macaroni and cheese here I come!