Chocolate Mug Cake

Yup, mug cake. That is totally not a typo. Tonight I had felt a really strong urge to have chocolate cake. Part of it is because this coming Thursday I'm finally getting out of my house and going out to a restaurant. It'll be the first time I'm leaving my house since I came back from hospital so I was very excited. Looking over the menu of the venue we're going to I got this intense craving for turkish bread and chocolate cake.

Unfortunately my cravings for turkish bread and dip is left for another day. I was, however, able to satisfy my cravings for Chocolate cake thanks to Not Quite Nigella and pictures from Lucas (who blogs at CoverVersions).

I made a chocolate cake in a mug and it was really strangely very very tasty. So let's get down to the main part of this post so you can all have a recipe to turn to on those nights you feel like cake but you're too lazy to actually bake one. This recipe takes 5 minutes from start to finish (finish being washing up done and eating cake) so it's really worth it on certain nights you want to eat hot tasty cake really quickly.

I didn't even measure these ingredients out properly, I just used a big spoon from my drawer and roughly estimated everything. :3

Ingredients

4 Tablespoons flour

5 Tablespoons Sugar

2 Tablespoons Cocoa powder

1 Teaspoon baking powder
1/2 Teaspoon coffee powder (I left this out but it'd be nice for people who want a nice kick, up the quantitiy a little if you want to make a mocha cake)
pinch of salt
3 Tablespoons milk
3 Tablespoons oil
3 Tablespoons chocolate chips (in this part, I cut up two and a half rows of cadbury dark chocolate)
Splash of vanilla extract
1 egg

Method

1. Combine all of the ingredients into a bowl from the top of the list to the bottom of the list. Make sure you combine all the dry ingredients well before you start putting in the wet ingredients, just helps a little to make sure everything is distributed.

2. Cover the cup with glad wrap.

3. Microwave one cup at a time. Start off with just 1 minute and if it doesn't spring back when you poke it, go for another 30 seconds.

That is all you have to do to make a tasty tasty mug cake! I ate it just as it was but I'm sure it'll be even tastier with ice cream or whipped cream. But it was really decadent as it was for me. I felt a little bit sick after eating a whole cup...it would be perfect for me to share with someone! But this recipe makes two so if you love decadent, here you go!

Pandan Panna Cotta with Mango Puree

At the end of last month, I went into hospital to have surgery on my foot. With a cast around my right leg from the knee down, I was put on strict orders to rest for the next six to seven weeks.

Cooking counts as rest, right?

For the first week, I lay in bed and watched Top Chef and played some video games but the urge to create things was quite high so naturally, I decided to listen to those urges. I didn't feel up to taking on the Daring Bakers/Cooks challenges for this month as that would require me to ask someone to help me purchase ingredients, so I decided to just play with some flavours on my own and make a panna cotta.

Mangoes are now coming in and they're as tasty as ever so who could resist making a slightly more asian inspired green panna cotta?

Photography is courtesy of a good friend of mine and you can see much more of his work right here.

So without much further ado, have the recipe and off you go. I hope you all enjoy.

Makes about 15 little jars of panna cotta.

Ingredients:
1L Pouring Cream (it will say 35% fat content on the bottle)
100g Sugar
2 tsp pandan essence (find this at any asian grocery store)
12 Gelatin leaves
1L cold water
2 mangoes

Method:
1. Soak the gelatin leaves in the cold water for about ten minutes. When done, squeeze gently to remove any excess water and put into a mixing bowl. While you're waiting for the soak, you can complete the rest of the cream steps.

2.  Place the cream and sugar into a pot and stir over a very low heat until the sugar has melted. In this step bring up the heat very gently until it's lukewarm. When I took the pot off the stove, I was able to hold the pot in my hands without any worries.

3. Pour pandan essence into the cream mixture and stir in a little. Don't need to be thorough here, there is much more stirring to be done.

4. Pour the cream mixture over the gelatin leaves and start stirring. Make sure all of the gelatin leaves dissolve and incorporate here. If you're finding it a bit difficult, put it back onto the stove on a very low heat, you don't want the cream to cook in any way so be very careful with the heat.

5. When that has all been mixed in, I strained the mixture into another bowl just to make sure all the gelatin was fully dissolved.

6. Spoon mixture out into individual jars and put in frige to set for a few hours or overnight.

7. Dice up the two mangoes and puree half of it. I also added two tablespoons (roughly) of cream in with the mangoes as I pureed it. This removed a little bit of the tartness of the mango but you can skip that if you want, a little tart flavour would compliment the sweet panna cotta very well if that's a flavour you enjoy.

8. Combine the mango with the puree and spoon over the set panna cotta.