Mug Cake Verdict

Last night, I was thinking about cupcakes a friend made for me last Valentine's Day. She used her grandmother's German chocolate cake recipe* and piped the top with a peppermint buttercream frosting. It was music with every bite, and I made sure I enjoyed a symphony.

We had no cake in sight, but we did have cake ingredients. Here was the problem: I have a short attention span with food, and I didn't want to make a whole sheet of cake when I knew that only a piece or two would suffice. Then, I remembered LeannIAm's recent microwaved mug cake binge. You can find the recipe here. Cake on demand? How brilliant!

The boy read off the ingredients as I measured and mixed. We popped the mug into the microwave, and watched it for 3 minutes. The cake rose above the mug and we were ready to rochambeau over who had to clean the microwave.


As soon as the three minutes were up, the "cake" deflated back to a reasonable size.


It was OK. The cake was dense and eggy, but not as dense as a chocolate decadent. I also added less sugar and used olive oil to try to make it more gourmet, but let's face it: it's a cake you make in 3 minutes using a microwave.

I ate a few bites, and then hit my cake limit. The boy happily gobbled the rest of it down.

Will I make it again? Probably not, but I am glad I did it once. It was a neat kitchen experiment.


*So, an odd fact about me is that I sometimes hate chocolate and most of the time I hate cake. Yes, hate. The boy and I were very close to having French macaroons as the celebratory dessert when we got married until Masse's Pastries came to the rescue. I have to be in the right mood to eat the stuff, so the fact that these cupcakes made me gaga shows that a lovingly made dessert can transcend my food aversions, because the odds of me liking them were slim. I almost let the boy eat all of the cupcakes, but I became suspicious that they were delicious when he overdid it on the "oh, these suck!" It's hard to convey that something sucks when you can barely stop chewing to properly pronounce words.