If you work in an office with a microwave in the break room, there’s a chance you’ll catch a strong chocolate aroma during break time. That’s because the “Cake in a Mug” recipe, which requires a coffee mug, a microwave oven, hot chocolate mix and a few other easy-to-get ingredients has been making the rounds on the forwarded-email circuit.
The Recipe
There are a few variants of the recipe floating around the ‘net. This is the simplest one and comes from Wired’s “How-To” wiki.
Ingredients
- Egg: 1
- Flour: 4 tablespoons
- Hot chocolate mix: 9 tablespoons
- Non-stick cooking spray
- Oil: 3 tablespoons
- Water: 3 tablespoons
The Steps
- Spray the non-stick cooking spray into the mug.
- Add the flour and hot chocolate mix to the mug and store them together.
- Add the egg and stir.
- Add the water and oil and stir until you have a cake batter-like mixture. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the mug so there aren’t any pockets of dry ingredients left.
- Microwave the mixture at high for 3 minutes. As it makes, a cylinder of cake will rise from the mug. It’ll shrink slightly after the baking is done.
- When the 3 minutes are done, take the mug from the microwave and tip the cake cylinder out of the mug into a dish. Use a fork to break the cake into quarters, which will allow steam to escape from the center.
- Let the cake cool a little, then dig in!
I Want to Believe, But Can’t
The problem with the recipe is that it uses a microwave for baking.
Microwave ovens work by bathing the food in low-energy microwave radiation, which creates an alternating electrical field in the oven. Water molecules, thanks to their shape, are more positively charged at one end and more negatively charged at the other. Because of these charges, they will align themselves with an electrical field, and if you constantly alternate this field, they will constantly realign themselves with the field, which creates molecular motion, which creates heat.
The practical upshot of all this is that microwaving is essentially boiling without the immersion. As long as the kind of cooking you’re doing is steaming or boiling (or their kissing cousins, thawing and reheating), a microwave oven will do the job, and more quickly than conventional boiling. However, if you want to get the complex flavours that come from the breaking down of proteins and the caramelization of sugars, you need temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. That’s why boiled food is bland and why chefs have long scoffed at microwave ovens.
That’s also why I think Cake in a Mug won’t be any good – it’s essentially a boiled cake.
Some folks at the SomethingAwful forums gave the recipe a try, and the general consensus is that while it smells great, the taste and texture of the cake are terrible. One particularly curious person replaced the chocolate mix with Strawberry Quik and ended up with this pink horror:
I don’t think I’ll bother trying out the recipe.
