No scales? No oven? No problem! Make a microwave mug cake in less than five minutes!

Life’s been a bit hectic recently. Craving cake, but keen to cut corners, I finally made something I’ve been wanting to try for ages: microwave mug cake. I’ve seen various recipes for mug cake online over the years, but I never believed it could work. Well it does!

I got the original recipe at BBC Good Food. I made changes to the microwave time they suggest… but I’ll get to that later.

Ingredients (makes 1 very large mug cake or 2 smaller mug cakes or 4 ramekin cakes)

• 4 tbsp plain flour
• 4 tbsp caster sugar
• 2 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1 egg
• 3 tbsp milk (I’ve made microwave mug cake using skimmed and full-fat milk and it didn’t make any difference to the result. Use whatever you have in the fridge)
• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• Optional extras: a drop of peppermint essence or orange flavouring; a spoonful of peanut butter; chocolate chips. Whatever you want to use to make your mug cake a bit more special.

Method

Measure the flour, sugar and cocoa powder into a bowl. I sifted my ingredients to get rid of any lumps and used a large pyrex jug rather than bowl. Mix them together with a fork.

Add the egg and beat it into the dry ingredients thoroughly. Add the milk and oil and stir the whole mixture until smooth. If you want to add any flavouring – vanilla, mint or orange, for example – add them now and stir it through. This would also be the time to stir in chocolate chips if you want them in your microwave cake.

Pour your chocolate cake batter into your mug or mugs. If you’d like a peanut butter centre to your microwave cake, pour enough batter into your mug to cover the bottom, put a teaspoonful of peanut butter on top, then cover with more cake batter. As you can see from the following picture, don’t fill the cup more than half way because you need to leave the rest of the height of the mug for the chocolate cake to rise.

Put in the microwave for 2.5 minutes. This is the tricky bit because the cooking time will vary depending on your microwave and the power level you use.

I cooked the mug cakes at 700 W. The first time I followed the original recipe and cooked them for 3 minutes. This was far too long. The cake was very dry and a little “over-brown”. Since then I’ve been steadily decreasing the cooking time. In the last batch, I microwaved on mug cake for 2.5 minutes and the other for 2 minutes and 20 seconds and both turned out much better.

Obviously a cake made in 2.5 minutes in a microwave isn’t going to taste as heavenly as one baked slowly for 20 minutes in an oven. However, the results of using the microwave are surprisingly good and ideal if you’ve got a serious cake craving but don’t want the work of making a big cake or just can’t wait! This next picture gives you an idea of the texture of the microwave mug cake:

I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with this recipe. The quantities make 2 decent sized mug cakes or, it turns out, 4 ramekin-sized desserts:

I over-cooked mine (this was before I perfected the cooking time with my microwave), but they still tasted lovely served warm with some ice-cream.

A quick bonfire night treat perhaps?

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If you’re looking for more chocolate cake, try:

 

Chocolate fudge cake with chocolate buttercream frosting.

 

 

 

 

 

Stracciatella chocolate chip loaf cake.

 

 

 

 

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Claire Huston / Art and Soul