For my half birthday this year, I decided to make a cake in my bread maker. It has a cake setting, so it can't be that hard!
Even though I can, and often do, use the delay feature for bread, I don't think that feature is an option for cakes. The cake setting takes 2 hours to complete. So to have cake on a weeknight before my kid's bedtime, I had to make sure it was ready to start as soon as I got home from work. This meant putting all the dry ingredients together first.
So the night before I mixed the flour, baking powder, sugar, etc. in the bread pan. The next night, when I got home, all I had to do was beat a few eggs, add some vanilla and a few other wet ingredients and pour it into the bread pan and hit start. 2 hours later, the cake was ready to eat and it smelled delicious!
However when I took it out of the bread pan, I noticed that the bottom was full of flour and cocoa powder. You could say it was "caked" on! So much that I had to scrape a bunch of it off and when I took the first piece and tried to eat it, it basically tasted like flour and was inedible. The middle pieces weren't terrible, though, and I learned a lesson: When you make cake in a bread maker, ingredient order is important. Or, at least, mix all the ingredients before you press start.
UPDATE: I tried making this cake again, and although it was better, it still wasn't a great cake. My tip is to make bread in the bread maker and not cakes.
