Well what do you know! The cake I was waiting on when I was writing the previous post did back and was devoured before I could say Jack Robinson!
OK, I said Jack Robinson many times before the cake was actually ready, but once it was it didn’t last long.
On Friday night I went to bed knowing that first thing Saturday morning I would be putting the solar oven together and making my first sun cooked dish ever. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to make…. I love slow cooked stews and pot roasts, but as a novice, I am still a little weary of cooking meat in the oven, although it is done all over the world, and the internet is full of recipes to prove it.
Anyway, I woke up on Saturday, not very bright and not very early at 0900, which is quite late for me, especially if I need to get an unknown dish ready to go….
After looking at my supplies it turned out that since we only had salad vegetables, and meat or chicken was out of the question at this point, I really had no choice but to make a cake.
I had one technical problem I hadn’t solved yet, and that was the question of the pot lid.
In a solar oven, while the foil reflects the heat and light of the sun, the pot you cook in needs to be black so that it can trap the heat, and not reflect it back at the foil like a white or steel colored pot would do. I do have an old black pot, but it doesn’t have a lid, so I usually use a lid from a white pot I have which is of a similar size.
This wouldn’t do today, so I had to improvise a lid out of the bottom of an adjustable baking pan.
I think that this had some effect on the time it took for my cake to bake, but more on that later.
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Anyway, I made my batter, and chose a spot in the garden where shade falls latest in the day, and positioned my cookit on the cart I had previously used for my seedlings, (Life has a way of working out like that. If I had made the oven earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to use this cart, which conveniently has wheels on it, for my cookit.) Making sure the longest shadow it created was directly behind it. I wasn’t quite sure what angle to position the lower front flap. So I just let it do what came natural, and I think that also had an effect on the length of time it took for the cake to bake.
In the pdf from solar cooking org, it says that it should take about double the time to cook any thing in the solar cooker, so I estimated, since this cake takes about 45-50 minutes in the oven, it would take at least 2 hours in the cookit, if not more.
I started it at 1050, and at about 1300 took a look to see how it was doing. There was condensation on the inside of the plastic bag in which the pot sits, effectively acting as a heat trap, and the pot was very hot to the touch, both good signs, but the cake was not done. I could see that something was happening, because it had bubbles on the top, so it was obviously rising. An hour later it peeped again (and when I say peep – I mean peep…just lift the lid slightly, peep quickly and close it all up again) it looked like nothing had changed. I am sorry that I didn’t touch the surface with my finger to see how it felt – if it was more viscous than it was when I first started baking it.
Anyway, I decided a siesta was in order, and at about 1500, I woke up and went to see if I could have some cake with my coffee, and it turns out that I could!!
It had turned to a lovely golden brown, and was obviously ready (this time I did check with my finger.)
When I back a cake in the oven, there is usually a thin crust on the top when it is ready, and the middle is higher than the edges. In this case, there was no crust at all, and it seemed to have risen evenly, except for the fact that the pot it was in had been sitting on a slant, so the cake came out slanted as well.
Did I get to eat it with my coffee? No, not quite. It got devoured by R and the Kids before the kettle had time to boil! (Yes, they did have lunch! It was just that good J)
Tags: cookit, ecological, environmentally friendly, Solar cake, solar cooking
