Happy Birthday Again, Bully!

We had cake...

Birthday Cake

It's my birthday! And I'm alone for most of the day... that's ok, big weekend ahead. But I wanted cake today. So I made a mug cake and topped it with chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup:

Cake-in-a-Mug Experiment (#1)

After lunch today, I rounded up the ingredients for Chocolate Cake in a Mug and made sure I had everything. Then I pulled out a trusty KBTC mug, the largest in our regular use collection, and got started.

First I sprayed the mug with the cooking spray, then measured out four tablespoons of flour. Then I got the cocoa mix out and measured out nine tablespoons of that. Whew, thats a lot of gunk in the mug! I wasn't sure it was all going to fit, really. I stirred it up good, like the directions said, but as it turned out not quite good enough.


Next came the wet ingredients. I added the egg and stirred a little to get a gluey, clumpy mess. Then 3 tablespoons of veggie oil and 3 tablespoons of water. After a bit of heavy stirring, it got to looking (and tasting) a little like real cake mix. Not perfect, mind, but better than I was expecting.


Feeling very uncertain, I popped it in the microwave for the 3 minutes of cooking. After about a minute, I could smell the "cake" baking. After another ten seconds, part of the cake popped above the rim of the mug and looked around.


When I got it out of the microwave, the top came off into the bowl just fine, but most of the cake remained stuck in the mug. I had to use a knife to loosen it from the sides and pull it out. When it fully emerged, I discovered that I hadn't mixed up the flour at the bottom, along the edge of the mug, well enough.


Still, it smelled a lot like cake. So I sat down to munch it. VERY HOT! It takes a minute to cool down. Give it a minute. But after it cooled a little, I was very pleasantly surprised. It tastes like chocolate cake. Not the best ever chocolate cake, but certainly better than I was expecting from 3 minutes in a microwave. It's nicely moist, I bet a little Hershey's Syrup would make it even better.

Total cooking utensils used: one measuring spoon, one mixing spoon, one knife, one mug, and one bowl to eat it from. Total prep time: maybe 2 minutes. Total cooking time: 3 minutes. Result: very passable chocolate cake that has a lot of potential if you use higher quality cocoa or add some pizzazz (chocolate chips are suggested on the wiki).

Conclusion: I'll be trying this again, watching for the mistakes I made the first time. I thought I'd mixed it well enough, clearly I need to work on that. Clean up is also a concern, but I got the mug soaking as soon as I took the cake out, so I hope it won't be difficult. I'm looking forward to trying for variants. I wonder if grating some dark chocolate into the mix would work? Hmmmmm....mmmmmmmm!

Hot Cake in a Mug

If I can round up all the ingredients, I'm going to try to make Chocolate Cake in a Mug tomorrow. Maybe I'll take pictures. Maybe I'll be too embarrassed to blog about it.