I Love It! (Cannon 10512G)

Member Name: chrisandmark

Product:	Cannon 10512G
Date:	20/08/04 (917 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cooks everything to perfection, Easy to clean, Looks the business!

Disadvantages: The glass lid can get smeary

Before Christmas we decided we needed a shiny new cooker to cook Christmas dinner on. I knew I wanted gas because I simply can't get to grips with cooking in an electric cooker, I wanted the grill underneath the hob (as opposed to at eye level) and I wanted different sized burners. Most importantly I wanted a shiny new SILVER cooker to go in my newly decorated kitchen. I looked everywhere. I saw silver cookers, I saw cookers with different sized burners, I saw hundreds of different gas cookers and I saw low level grills. But not all on the same cooker. Until I stopped off at Currys. I was talking to an assistant, explaining in great detail exactly what I was after in more or less the way I've told you above. I actually saw the mans eyes glaze over as he informed me 'No, sorry madam but we don't have anything fitting that description. Can I suggest you try Powerhouse?' Powerhouse the ELECTRIC people, that is... As he was breaking the bad news I happened to glance behind me at the cooker I was leaning against and guess what? It was a silver gas cooker with low level grill and different sized burners... and the idiot in Currys was looking straight at it! I won't go into a full scale rant against Currys now, that is definitely saved for another review, because I'm here today to extol the virtues of my new cooker.

The Cannon Oakley. Sounds a bit country kitchen doesn't it? But it's not, it looks trendy. The picture above just doesn't do it justice, the doors to the grill and oven are a matt silver colour with slightly smoked glass. The doors both have a thick horizontal handle in the same matt silver colour, the perfect thickness for my hands to grip comfortably when opening and closing the doors. The rest of the cooker is a black enamel. The silver and black go beautifully together making a sophisticated and very trendy combination.

So what does it do? Obviously it cooks things otherwise it
wouldn't be called a cooker, would it? The oven part has two shelves which can be taken out and moved up or down to suit the size of whatever you're cooking, on Christmas Day I removed the top shelf completely to accommodate the turkey, or if you're cooking a flat dish (chips on a baking tray and the like) you can move the bottom shelf so that it's directly below the top shelf allowing the chips to cook in roughly the same time as if you had them on the top shelf. This is handy when I'm cooking, say, fishfingers and chips for the kids because most frozen ready to cook items have to be cooked at the same temperature (usually Gas Mark 7) and this can pose a problem when it comes to making sure they're both cooked at the same time. Moving the shelf up allows both the chips and fishfingers to be cooked at roughly the same height meaning both the foodstuffs are cooked at the same time. And as any mum knows, getting the fishfingers and chips cooked perfectly is of the utmost importance! The shelves have a safety stop so you can pull the shelf out to check on your cooking without the worry of pulling it all the way out and dropping your food all over the floor. On my previous cooker this was definitely an issue because the shelves would slide out so smoothly that occasionally I pulled them out too far and *smash* one broken casserole dish... or two. The oven is self lighting and as soon as you twist the knob you'll hear the clicking of the ignition as it lights the gas, brilliant for when you've got a roasting tin in one hand and are trying to light the oven with the other. One thing to remember is not to cook on the bottom of the oven as it's too close to the main burner and this is obviously a fire hazard, this is vitally important because I remember my mum used to cook her joints of meat on the bottom of her oven and one night the fat spat out of the meat and almost set fire to her cooker.

A useful feature of this co
oker is the 'slow cook' facility. This means that all dishes cooked on this setting should be cooked for at least six hours, although if you want to use 'slow cook' for joints of meat or poultry then you must cook it at Gas Mark 6 for 30 minutes prior to turning it down to slow cook. This feature is brilliant for the casseroles and soups that we seem to be living on in this house since the weather turned nasty as the meat cooks in the juice for so long that it just falls apart in your mouth. Theoretically this means you can cook your joint of meat overnight although the thought of leaving the oven on and unattended while I'm in bed would be likely to bring on a panic attack!

The different sized burners that I've been coveting for so long are brilliant. The large one is a high speed burner, just the job for cooking pasta as this has to be kept at a rolling boil. Also very good for when you've (I mean I've) forgotten to switch the heat on under the spuds and need them cooked in 10 minutes flat. You've also got two normal sized burners and a teeny simmering burner which is perfect for warming up baked beans or previously cooked and chilled foods.

The glass lid which covers the hob is pleasing to the eye. The burners and supports are always an eyesore no matter now nice your cooker is, this is the area where electric cookers have a slight edge. So the clever bod who invented a glass lid to lift down and cover the unsightly gas burners deserves some sort of medal, I know these glass lids have been around for yonks but I was still thrilled when I saw one on my cooker. It lifts up and down smoothly but the hinges are nice and snug so there's no chance of the lid crashing down and covering the kitchen (and you!) in glass. There is a safety feature on the cooker which means you can't light the gas before lifting the glass lid fully and I think this is a brilliant idea for fuggy minded people like me. It
's a bit of a nightmare to clean the lid because no matter now hard you rub or how clean the cloth is, the glass is always really smeary. I won't use polish or glass cleaner on it because of how close it is to the area where you cook so I've resigned myself to smears.

The grill's erm... a grill really. Working on the assumption that you all know what a basic grill is, this is a basic grill on a lower level. This is perfect for me because, being a short arse, I can check to make sure the toast isn't burning without having to take the entire grill pan out and pulling it down to my level.

Cleaning the cooker is a dream, in the instruction book there's a long list of different detergents you need to use on different parts of the cooker but I find using a mild detergent like Stardrops or CIF will clean the whole thing without the need for chopping and changing. As I mentioned above, the glass lid is a bit of a problem to clean but if I keep trying different things on it that should be as shiny as the rest of the cooker soon! The oven itself is pretty much self cleaning, the inside walls are painted with a special enamel which continuously cleans itself whenever the oven is cooking at a high temperature. All I've found it necessary to do to the inside of the oven is wipe it out with a hot soapy cloth once a week or so. It obviously doesn't get up any chips that have dropped onto the bottom of the cooker so you'll have to do that yourself!

The addition of a clock and minute minder on the cooker is a bonus, I've got the worst memory in the world and have lost count of the amount of times I've burnt the dinner simply because I forgot it was in the oven. It's really easy to set, simply hold the ( + ) display button down until the time you need to count down to is showing on the clock display, a bell will also be displayed to remind you this is the minute minder and not the clock. When the
time gets down to zero a bleeper will sound and you have to press the ( + ) again to stop the bleeper. The default sound for the bleeper is fine with me but you can adjust the pitch easily using the ( + ) or ( - ) buttons. You also use these buttons to set the clock, not forgetting to plug the cooker in first! You've got a light inside the main oven which is useful for checking how the food's going without opening and closing the door every few minutes, particularly when you're cooking a cake or pie because they're notoriously easy to 'sink' when the oven door opens!

The height of the cooker is 900mm, while the width is 500mm and the depth is 600mm. The depth caused a few problems for me because our kitchen units have a depth of 525mm so the cooker stuck out for a while, enough to be irritating but not enough to be look awful, but we had our units built out to sit flush with the cooker and the problem was solved. If you're going to do a search for this cooker on the net it might be an idea to search using the model number, which is 10512G, as it doesn't always find the best pages using the word 'Oakley'.

All in all, this is easily the best cooker I've had. Everything I've cooked in the oven has come out perfect, and the times it hasn't is down to me being a bit naff in the kitchen! Once I overcame the difference in cooking times required for this cooker compared to my old cooker everything went well. From Currys this cooker cost me £349 although a certain price comparison site suggests looking out for one from £299.99 which is a pretty hefty discount if you don't mind shopping around. Another thing worth mentioning is the rather excellent 'Cannon Use and Installation Manual' which comes with the cooker. A small booklet which contains information you need for the use of your cooker and NOTHING ELSE. I don't know about you but I'm sick and tired of buying a new applian
ce and being saddled with a 200 page instruction book, not from Cannon. The booklet simply tells you how to install and look after your cooker, brief instructions on how to get the best from it (I mean, it's hardly rocket science is it?), a cooking times guideline chart and a nice little troubleshooting section. No wading through hundreds of pages just to find out how to change the bulb in the oven!

Thanks for reading, off to bake another batch of cakes now. Did I mention I had a shiny new cooker?

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