Sunday, October 19, 2008

A Thing-A-Week Part 38: Cake in a Mug

So I found online the following recipe:

4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
a small splash of vanilla extract

Essentially, you mix all those ingredients in that order in a large coffee mug and microwave it for about 3 minutes and you get cake...theoretically. I tried it and what you get is a large brown lump of slightly burnt cocoa with a sort of waxy rubbery texture. It is cake if you squint really really hard. I wasn't really surprised but a little disappointed. There has to be a way to manage the science to get something more cake like. I think chocolate is right out unless it is a white cake with chocolate chips because the temperature is too hot and too fast for cocoa which burns fairly easily.

I didn't take pictures but this website is almost exactly what it looks like. Although their's looks more like cake so perhaps the wattage on my microwave is too high. It could have been that my cocoa was too good as well. I have noticed some recipes only really work with a more generic cocoa.

Although in doing a web search there are all sorts of variations online so perhaps it could just have been a bad example. I am not sure whether or not it warrants further investigation though because at the end of it, I know that mixing all of the same ingredients and just baking it an oven will yield good cake as opposed to sub standard cake. And no one deserves sub standard cake.

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