Mug muffins?
Winter is a challenging season. I manage ok until about mid- February, but then my body starts to make it quite clear that I’m done with cold, snow, grey skies, and rare sunshine. By March every day is a struggle. I love my job, my family, my friends, and life in general (except for covid), but it takes a huge force of will and an exhausting amount of energy to pull myself through every day until the sun and warmth come back…and then miraculously I feel like a whole new person. I know I’m not alone in this.
So in honor of those of us who struggle with winter (or recipe making for any reason) this week I’ve continued the “I don’t want to cook” theme. Because I still don’t want to cook. Thankfully, skillet meals and bowl meals are fairly simple ways to throw together dinner, but I’m in the mood for more. A treat. A muffin, but without the work of making a dozen of them. And so, to make that goal a reality with as little effort as possible, I experimented a bit with microwave mug muffins. A single muffin, a single mug, a few ingredients, and a few minutes’ time. Sounds perfect!
Photo by Emre Can from Pexels
The first recipe I tried was this gluten-free vegan blueberry muffin in a mug from feastingonfruit.com. The recipe was simple, consisting only of oat flour, baking powder, (safe) vanilla extract, liquid sweetener, applesauce, and blueberries. I used pure maple syrup in my muffin, decreasing the amount by half because of the intense sweetness of the syrup. Watching the “baking” muffin expand in the microwave in only two minutes was fascinating. I highly recommend finding a large mug for this recipe – the muffin was huge before it settled. (You can see the ring it left in the tall mug I used.) The finished muffin was moist, delicious, and very sweet. Definitely a success! Next time I make the recipe I think I’ll use only 1½ teaspoons of maple syrup, ¼ of what’s called for in the recipe. I think I’ll enjoy it even more with less sweetener.
The other mug “muffin” recipe I tried wasn’t actually a muffin. It was a cake. Chocolate cake. This gluten-free chocolate mug cake from Mamaknowsglutenfree.com. I love chocolate, the first muffin turned out well, and I learned a couple things about making mug muffins (like to use a wider mug), so what could go wrong?
A fair amount, as it turns out.
For the record, though, the difficulties weren’t due to the recipe. They were entirely self-inflicted. I altered the recipe without trying the original first. Given my experience with the first muffin, I decreased the sugar in my test cake to ½ of what was called for in the recipe, replaced half of the oil with applesauce, and used a wider mug. The recipe suggested a 70-second “bake”, but it was clear that my cake needed longer – there was a visible liquid-y spot on top. I added another 10 seconds of cooking time, which appeared to do the trick (although it still looks shiny in the photo).
When I started eating the dessert all seemed fine. It was moist and chocolatey, and a little less sweet than a typical cake, obviously due to my alteration. Or at least the top 2/3 was. Underneath the edible portion there was a thick layer of goo. It reminded me of a story a co-worker once told me about a batch of cupcakes she made for her kids. Every day for a week they asked to have one packed in their school lunches-the kids seemed to love them! She later found out that they were a valuable commodity being traded at school: special cupcakes with fudge inside. Mmmmmmmm, uncooked batter.
Anyway, whether my cake didn’t cook properly because of the alterations, or the mug, or the cook time, I don’t know. But I did learn another important lesson about mug recipes: you still need to test the result with a toothpick!