Recipe: Bowl Cake
Lately I’ve been enjoying the Miss Jones Baking Brownie mix (which advertises itself as “guilt free”, but so is every food when you have the right attitude). I was traveling where I knew I’d have a kitchen so I brought along a pack but realized up arrival that I had no baking dish. Equipped with a good cake mix, I thought it might be the perfect time to reattempt the illusive mug cake, which I try about once a year or so — just long enough for the memory of the previous attempt to be successfully suppressed.
I pride myself on being a good cook and am even more prideful of the fact I don’t use recipes. But even my hubris has a limit.
I looked up a mug cake recipe. A table spoon of egg. A table spoon of water. The result? A mug of shit. A hot insult to the concept of cake.
I had been so confident in my scheme that it took me until I’d eaten most of the mug “cake” to realize it was bad. The residual heat of the mug had quickly turned the “cake” into a hardened steaming lump and even if it hadn’t, the batter was too gritty to be worth scraping off the sides of the ceramic mug. Of course cake in 45 seconds was too good to be true.
Satisfying cakes are produced only from the precise art of baking, which (unlike stove top foods) I’ve always left to the experts. I should have known better than to expect so much from a microwave and good intentions. But I still had so much cake mix left. And it was obvious what the problems of the mug cake were, which meant I couldn’t help but attempt a solution. The entire situation just needed more room.
I grabbed a cereal bowl.
In a bowl the walls are high enough to allow the cake to rise. The base is wide enough to allow for a proper amount of wet ingredients and space to mix them.
Once again life was teaching me that I’m best served by my own rules. I’ve never been steered wrong making up my own recipe as I go along. Here’s my first attempt at writing one down and sharing it. I’ve made—and enjoyed—this enough times now to feel it was worth reccomending as an alternative to “mug cake”
Ingredients:
Your preferred cake or brownie mix, because if you were going to sift flour you might as well pre heat an oven too.
One egg. (To use only a little bit of egg as most mug cake recipes suggest is simultaneously impractically austere and indulgently wasteful. In my initial attempt I saved the rest of the egg to make an omelette with later, which didn’t pan out because it’s very unappealing to make an omelette with leftover egg, and potentially unsafe.)
A heavy slosh of oil. (I want to say enough oil to cover your palms if you were to cup them together but that’s a ridiculous way to communicate a liquid amount. And you might have hands much bigger or smaller than me. Try a quarter cup and if the mix looks dry add another tablespoon or two.)
Instructions:
Lightly whisk the egg just until the yolk and white is combined.
Add the cake or brownie mix you chose
Add the oil.
Slowly mix them together until thoroughly combined, no eggy streaks or lumps of dry batter. I say slowly because you don’t want puffs of the mix dusting up at you while you’re mixing. My excitement had me coughing chocolate air.
Cook in microwave. Now this part is even more imprecise than the oil measurement because microwaves vary. 70 seconds is my recommendation. But essentially you want more than 60 and less than 90. The cake gets very hot very fast, it will continue cooking even after you stop the microwave, so a few seconds under is better than over. Watch the cake puff up in the microwave and take it out a few seconds after it has puffed back down.
Take out your cake. You may let it cool but you don’t have to, the entire point of this is to not have to wait for cake. It’ll be hot, be careful not to burn yourself.
Be pleased :)