Colorbar Labels w/o Mapping Toolkit

This is getting a bit ridiculous. Can it be there is no way to change the labels in a colorbar, say of a surface plot, so that latex can interpret the labels?

I.E.

    cBar = colorbar('Location','EastOutside');
    set(cBar,'xtick',[],'ytick',[0 2e-3]);
    set(cBar,'yticklabel',{'0'; '2*10^3'})
% Now there seems to be no way to get this interpreted by latex? Really???

I have checked format_ticks.m which works fine for tick labels of all but colorbars. Also, the function lcolorbars seems to be doing the trick - if you have the mapping toolbox.

All I need is my exponentials to be interpreted by latex.

I am at a loss.