We Made a Cake

Myself and Adam (Ross being in work) ended up playing Starcraft today, an experience I relish, but after that, things got a little slow, so we decided to make a cake. We’d seen a recipe for a “Five minute cake” earlier in the week, and figured it’d be worth a go.

The recipe includes “Cake Flour” but we didn’t have any of that, so we subbed in self-raising flour, and it worked out alright. We just used half a tablespoon less.

The recipe calls for the cake to be made in a mug and, given the number of comments involving mug related injuries, we figured an expendable mug would be best.


It’s hard to find anything very much more expendable than Goofy… that fucker.

We added all of the ingredients in the right order (which is basically, all the powders first, then an egg, then oil, then milk and mix). We’d been worried until now that it wouldn’t emulsify, or might take significantly more space than we had to give it, but in the end it all fit in alright.


No shell, motherfuckers!

The smell of cocoa permeates everything, it’s surprisingly strong, and smells somehow caffeinated. Adam is literally still coughing ten minutes after the event… that said, we did inhale more cocoa than most over the course of our arguing whether or not certain things would work. Among those things, can you efficiently measure milk in tablespoons? Can you still do so with a tablespoon covered in cake batter?


“How many are even in there? Is that three spoons?”
“Three… ish. I guess. Look, it’s fine”


Adam looks far less frustrated in sepia, so it makes us look like better people if we include this shot. It’s so homey and 1950s. I wonder can we get a spot in good housekeeping…


He’s like a cross between the joyous mother, helping a retarded child to bake a cake, and a palsied child trying to bake a cake.

After that, all we had to do was learn to use the new microwave, which was far more difficult than it needed to be. We spent at least twenty minutes trying to use the microwave this morning, so it had yielded most of its secrets to us, with the exception of how to make it work for a certain amount of time.


To operate this effectively you need to be a safecracker… :(

Fortunately enough, the microwave kind of did its own thing… I think it might have been set to “Beverage”, though whether or not this was because it could somehow tell there was a mug or not is pretty up in the air. I wonder could it ever have told if there was a cake mug within…


In the end, the cake kind of escaped the mug, but that was an eventuality for which we were entirely prepared.

Just below there’s a shot of the actual cake itself; we broke it into chunks and dropped it in a bowl. It tasted like a Swiss roll, but it was still warm and since we’d constructed it with our bare hands – yeah, and some spoons and stuff, but you know what I mean – it tasted all the sweeter.


It tastes better than it looks. next time though, we’ll add some toppings.

The temptation to build a second cake was almost overwhelming, but instead I took this shot of our assembled ingredients… it pretty much sums up the whole process.

The total cooking time, including preparation and finding ingredients, was five minutes and thirty seconds.