Baking cakes in the Microwave ovens as compared to Electric ovens

Question

Is there a difference in the output or in the procedure when baking cakes in the Microwave ovens as compared to Electric ovens?

What are the basic and crucial differences found among cakes baked in the above mentioned different equipments?

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Bounty: 100
Question: If we run the microwave (which has a convection feature) on "grill and convection" mode only, does it become same as rectangular "Electric ovens"? Please explain why and how too.

Answer 1

Yes, there is a difference. You shouldn't be baking a cake (or anything else) in a microwave oven.

A microwave oven excites the water within your food. When you put in dough or batter, the excited water doesn't bind with the starch the way it does under normal heat, it escapes the starch, leaving you with a stone-hard piece of dough or batter.

There is something called "five-minutes microwave cake". I haven't tried it, but in the recipes floating around the interwebs it gets eaten while still hot (so probably before it has had the chance to get too hard). It also seems that there is a very small heat frame in which it gets OK. Bake it too much, and it will get hard, or burn. Bake it too little, and you end up with a mug of warm batter. It is also supposed to be a cupcake, I suspect that if you try to bake a bigger portion at once, there will be enough temperature difference in different zones of the batter to get underbaked, baked and hard portions all at once.

Bottom line: if you want to try for the fun of it, make a cupcake in the microwave, and watch your energy input (microwave watt setting and time) very closely, then eat immediately. You can find recipes all over the Web, e. g. on Instructables. If you want a real cake, don't bake in a microwave.

Answer 2

Here is an answer to your edit - I make it a separate one, because it concerns a different matter (mods please tell me if I should roll it into the old one).

Soegaard already explained the difference between heating by microwaves and by standard oven. The point is, they are completely different methods, and the same oven needs two types of heaters within the same body to have both settings.

Normally, I would assume (the same as soegaard does) that if you put the oven to the "convection" setting, the microwave heater is turned off. But the truth is that it is up to the manufacturer to decide if this really happens, or if both heaters are turned on in this setting. It surely sounds illogical, but we have evidence that it does happen - and the evidence was for an LG oven. See this question: Why do my pizzas get such hard crusts?. So we can't promise you that it is OK to bake them in your oven, and I suspect that a manufacturer implements a feature in the same way across ovens. So assuming that the oven in the other question works as it should (it could be a defect unit which doesn't turn off the microwave heater when it is supposed to), you have low chances of getting good cakes.

Does it make sense to implement the feature that way? If you aren't baking, probably yes. You see, in a microwave, you don't get a crust. Pure convection cooks slower than microwaves. If you are cooking a veggie casserole in the oven, you'll probably be happy to have convection and microwaves at the same time. This still doesn't explain why the manufacturer labelled the feature in this misleading way, or why it doesn't give you two separate dials, one for the microwave heater and one for the convection heater. Maybe the target customer group are people with minimal cooking skills who only use their oven for reheating prefrozen food.

So we can't tell you if your oven will bake a good cake or not - it depends on how it is built. The best way to know is to just try it. Make a normal bread dough - don't waste time on preferments and the like, go for minimal effort and expenses - and bake a loaf in the oven at the convection setting. Wait 2-3 hours o give it a chance to harden. If it tastes like a nice bread afterwards, then the microwave heater was turned off and the cake will bake well too. If it is unusually hard - microwaved dough is practically impossible to bite off - then the microwave heater stays on at the convection setting and you can't bake a cake either.

You may want to call customer service before you try, and ask if the "convection" setting turns off the microwave heater. If the person on the other end of the line knows for sure how the oven works, they can save you from a useless experiment. But there is always the chance that the call is a waste of time.

Answer 3

Answering your second question:

Question: If we run the microwave on "grill and convection" mode only, does it become same as rectangular "Electric ovens"? Please explain why and how too.

You must have a combination oven. It can heat the food in various ways. When you are using grill and convection the oven is working just as normal oven.

Understanding the various terms all boils down to understanding how energy (heat) is transfered to the food.

In a standard oven the heating element warms up adjacent air. The fan will eventually blow the air over the food, which will heat up. Energy transfer through gas (air) or liquid (water) is called convection. Thus your "convection" setting just means "regular oven".

All warm materials also send out heat radiation (infrared), thus the heating element will also transfer some of the energy to the food through radiation.

In a grill the heating element is so warm, that the radiation plays a much bigger part of the energy transfer. This it what your "grill" setting does.

The third way your oven can transfer energy is by help of microwaves. Microwaves penetrate the food item and cause the water molecules inside the food to vibrate. This vibration will heat up the other parts of the food.

Microwaves thus heat up the food from the inside. Convection and grill heat up the outside.

Answer 4

No one has seen Ferran Adria (Chef of the best restaurant in the world) make cake in a microwave? http://www.britishlarder.co.uk/el-bullis-test-kithcen-with-albert-adria/#axzz1cTaE1baY

Answer 5

I mostly use microwave with convection feature to bake my cakes and muffins and though i have achieved satisfactory results with the cakes, it is not the perfect method to bake a cake. few of my observations below:

1) When cooking in MW conv the crust of the muffin and cake dont brown. The crust stays crispy when the cake is out of the oven, but after storing the cake for a day or two, the crust goes soggy and sticky.

2) there is an unusual eggy smell in the cakes and muffins which is more often not masked even after the addition of pure vanilla extract. Btw this does not seem to happen in OTGs.