A Rice Cooker Cheesecake

A few times a year some of the moms at Yosei's preschool put on little cooking and crafts workshops.  Recently I attened one in which they showed us how to bake a cheesecake in our electric rice cookers.  Now, if there's one thing Japan lacks its some good cheesecakes,  but I decided to go hopeful for a good cheesecake.  And while they recipe they showed was very easy and pretty good, it still wasn't quite right too me; it was way too eggy :/  With the small amount of everything else the 4 eggs the recipe called for was just way too much.  So, I took this recipe, looked up some New York Cheesecake recipes, and did a little bit of alteration on the original rice cooker based recipe.  And, I must say, it turned out pretty awesome,  though it does lack the delicious graham cracker crust (graham cracker are quite difficult to locate around here) but its the cheesey cakey part I've always found to be the most important anyways :P
I'm going to share my experiment here,  but be warned I cook in metric soif you really want to try this as well a little digital kitchen scale that measures in grams is going to be a huge help ;)

The ingredients:

1 pack (200g) cream cheese

4g flour

40g sugar

45g heavy cream

1 egg

1tsp lemon juice

Normally cheesecake calls for sour cream, however they don't sell sour cream in Japan, so heavy cream and lemon juice is the substitute. 

Add cream cheese to mixing bowl

Using an electric mixer beat until soft.

Add all other ingredients to the bowl

Beat until smooth

Pour batter into the rice cooker pot

Put the pot into the rice cooker

Close the lid and hit start :)

This is where it starts to get a little time consuming, rice cookers can't finish the cheesecake in one go.  At both the workshop, and here at home it takes 3 cycles to cook the cake completely.

End of the first cycle, still very custardy in the middle, turn the cooker off completely, close the lid and hit start again.

End of the second cycle, not quite there yet. Turn the cooker off, close the  lid and hit start one last time.

End of the third cycle. The edges of the cake start to pull away from the sides of the pot and are turned a nice golden brown color.  Remove the pot from the cooker and leave the cake to cool for a minimum of 30 minutes before trying to remove it from the pot.

When you do remove it simply put a plate on top of the pot and flip it over.

And ta-da! And adorable little dome shaped cheese cake. After this you'll want to refrigerate it for a few hours so it firms up and turns nice and cheesecakey.

Enjoy!