bunn

I stumbled across one of these '18 mug cake' type articles, and thought: Mmmmm.  Cake.  But then I looked at the recipes, and some of them were a bit yuk, or demanded ingredients not easily available in this country etc etc, so I looked for others that might be easier to make.  These are what I ended up with.   I used to have a lot of mug cakes when I was a student whose primary cooking tool was a microwave - but I've forgotten most of the recipes I used to use now.

Lemon mug cake.  This would make more sense if it had a whole lemon in it, or half a lemon.    What gives with these recipes that use odd little quantities of a whole fruit, do people really make lots of mug cakes and serve them to people?  Not sure microwaves are designed for cooking groups of mugs, if you are cooking for volume, why not just make cupcakes in a tray designed for the job?

Raspberry mug cake with coconut flour - I fancy this enough that I may actually buy some coconut flour, although I suspect it of being an overpriced novelty -you never know until you try, right?

Editing to add...

I just made this cake!
 3tbsp of banana (ie, more or less one mashed banana), a whole egg, a tbsp and a half of coconut flour -  turns out that is actually way more than will fit into a normal sized mug, and I note that the photos actually show the cake in a large ramekin rather than a mug.  

I could just have got the mix into a normal mug, but it would have spilled everywhere as it rose.  I used a super-sized mug, which was about half-full when I put it into the microwave, and about full when I took it out.  However the cake did not cook through in 2 minutes, and I think I should have given it another 20 seconds.

I could definitely taste the banana and coconut as well as the raspberry, and the texture was noticeably fibrous, although not unpleasant.   I was a little surprised that the cake was not particularly sweet, despite all that banana, honey and sweet vanilla.

Apple cinnamon mug cake Nice idea, dubious about the requirement for apple sauce, why not just chop apple and use that?

Salted caramel mug cake.   Wins points for common sense for not telling you to use unsalted butter and then add salt like some of the silly recipes, but on the other hand you have to have to make some salted caramel sauce, and I'm fairly sure that could be done more easily in a mug.

 I'm not sure about this Lime Coconut cake : it looks tasty, but it just seems like however many of them you made, you'd end up with either an awkward quantity of coconut milk, or an awkward half-lime.

I guess this is really what a pinterest is supposed to be for but it seems to make more sense to just pile everything in a jumbled heap here. 

Philmophlegm requested cupcakes. I took this as an opportunity to cakesperiment.

( Beetroot cakes (with recipe), with, and without chocolate, lemon and spicecakes )
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( Custard flavour cupcakes )

( All the cakes, iced.  )

Rather tragically, while I was busy making cakes, Philmophlegm was coming down with what looks like a rather nasty little gastric bug, and hasn't been able to eat any of them!

It was philmophlegm's birthday yesterday.   I thought it would be nice to make him a birthday cake.  And then I thought, would it not be even nicer to make him a cake that was a GOLDEN FIRE DRAGON???
( Dragon photos beneath the cut )

On philmophlegm's birthday, we made a lot of tiny cakes.  Then we decorated them in an exciting manner.  My approach to the tiny cakes was to  include an interesting range of flavours, colours and textures : lemon, orange, cinnamon, nuts, chocolate...  Philmophlegm's approach to tiny cakes was to render them in the manner of Traveller Roleplaying supplements...

Behold the cakes! 

(I'm afraid the roleplaying cakes are not quite in focus.  This was mostly because decorating that many cupcakes is quite an effort so I didn't work as hard on photographing them as I might have).