slow-cooker cake

I don't know that I'd ever do this again, but here's something nutty I tried: slow-cooker chocolate cake. I probably should have read the recipe reviews before I embarked upon this adventure: the reviews mostly said the cake came out mushy and under-baked. Now, I know enough about things like camp cooking to know that cakes and breads are possible to make in some of the craziest environments, which is why I even bothered to try this recipe out. That said, so many of the reviews I belatedly read said that the cake needed way more than the recommended three hours—on low heat—to bake.

Ultimately, after more than four hours in the crock pot, the cake got finished in my oven, and even then, it probably could have used more time to bake. I also have to say that the recipe for this cake, while not shy with the chocolate, produced a very wet and runny batter that may ultimately have been part of the problem. You want your cake to have a nice rise and a moist, spongy texture. Well, this cake was moist, all right, but spongy? No. It was as thick as a brick. You could drop this cake from a building and kill someone with it.

I have two slow cookers at home: one from my boss, and a Chinese one I bought some years back. The Chinese one has an inner pot that has a rough, clay-like surface to it, so I knew I wouldn't be using that crock pot. My other slow cooker, the one from my boss, has a painted-over enamel-type surface that's very smooth and therefore better for releasing cakes. Still, a cake needs to be pretty solid before you can extract it from the inner crock pot, and I couldn't do that at the four-hour mark: the cake was still too moist and jiggly. So I took the entire inner pot out, put it in my oven, and used the oven's top burner to bake the cake into greater firmness. I worried that the crock pot would crack inside the oven, but it didn't, much to my relief. I essentially broiled the cake at about 400°F (about 200°C) for around ten minutes, hoping that that would be enough time to finish the cake off. 

A metal chopstick inserted into the cake in several places gave me mixed readings; some of the cake seemed ready; some of it didn't. I let the cake cool inside the oven, letting carryover heat do some more of the cooking, while I figured out how I was going to remove the cake from the crock pot. I had had the foresight to cover the bottom of the crock pot with a layer of combined butter, neutral vegetable oil, and parchment paper, so I knew the bottom would release just fine; the problem was going to be the sides. So I took a knife and separated the sides of the cake from the inside of the crock pot, then brought out a wooden cutting board, placed it over the crock pot, and turned the whole thing upside down, praying that gravity would take over. Plop. The cake plumped down onto the cutting board without incident, and when I removed the crock pot, I saw how thick the cake was: no need to make a layer cake out of this.

I knew the cake was too hot for me to ice it, so I containerized it in one of my sealable plastic boxes and decided I'd ice it at the office the following day. I did so and fed the cake to two of my coworkers (my boss is out this week because his kids both got COVID). My American coworker, just back from a family trip to Jeju Island, thought the cake was great, especially the icing. My Korean coworker also said he thought the cake was good. But when I cut into the cake, I could see it was super-dense and under-baked, which is why I don't think I'll be trying this slow-cooker method ever again. If the slow-cooker method ends with your having to finish the cake in an oven, you may as well just use the damn oven for the entire bake.

Here's the story of my super-dense cake in pictures:

While it looks overdone around the edges, it's actually not.
And the cake tasted fine; it's just the texture that was off.

I whipped up a batch of the same icing I'd used twice before on a different chocolate cake.

The icing of the cake begins.

The Death Star was completed on schedule. And I still don't know how to ice cakes.

I take my piece: the Death Star turns into Pac Man.

a view of my slice from above

a closer look at that incredibly dense, moist, under-baked crumb

later in the day, after my coworkers had had their way

I think that solid spot on the right side of the cake's cross-section is just smeared icing, not unbaked cake.

one last look at a second slice

In all, I think this cake was edible, but it's got the thick consistency of a tres leches cake, and it needs some sort of accompaniment, like milk or ice cream. My Korean coworker said as much, too. I'm back on my austerity tomorrow, so I won't know what the cake's like with milk, but maybe my boss will know, assuming he comes into work tomorrow.