An Interesting Cooking Experience

Lauren and I have been determined to make a cake for some time now and we decided that tonight was the night. Lauren had some rather ripe bananas so banana cake was on the menu. Between us we bought all the ingredients and were ready to go. The ingredients were all written in Japanese of course so we weren’t too sure if we had bought the right stuff and whether or not the cake would rise but we decided to experiment and see how we went…….everything was put together, the pan was greased, the oven was on – the mixture looked as it should so we were good to go. The cake was put into the oven and we waited half an hour. When time was up we checked the cake to see if it had cooked – well there were two brown patches on top of the cake and the rest was still kind of white. When we stuck a knife in to see if it was ready it was done so we took it out to cool. The cake had actually risen – maybe not to its full potential but it was passable. It actually looked quite good. While it was cooling I made some icing. This wasn’t turning out so well. For some reason the icing wasn’t thickening. I kept adding more icing but nothing was changing. I wondered if it was infact icing so I smelt it and couldn’t really smell anything and then tasted it and it tasted like icing so I figured it must have been as good as we were going to get over here. I decided that the icing wasn’t going to get any thicker than what it was so I just poured it onto the cake. It was slightly runny but it was ok. The cake was complete. It looked good and were looking forward to eating it. I made us some coffees and we were set. I went to cut the cake so that we could each have a piece and discovered that it was pretty hard. The knife struggled to get through it. I managed to cut two pieces so that we could at least try it……..well let me just say that it looked better than what it tasted. It was actually pretty ordinary. We couldn’t work out why the cake was rock hard – we did everything right……then we realised that the oven has a microwave setting on it too and that we must have microwaved the cake which would explain why when the cake cooled that it was rock hard. It was pretty funny really. We ate a few bites of our cake and ended up throwing the rest of the cake in the bin. We are going to attempt to make it again but this time use the actual oven setting and hopefully that will make a difference. If that doesn’t work then we have no idea and cakes will be OUT!!

Here is a picture of what the cake actually looked like……