Mug Cake--First Experiment

Mug cake with chocolate chips, with

fresh berries. (source: dreamstime.com)

Recently, upon discovering that I'd acquired a great fascination with cakes, I began exploring the wonderful world of mug cakes.  

Mug cakes are one-person-sized cakes where the batter is poured into an oversized coffee mug and baked in a microwave oven.  These two factors limit their caloric impact (and the potential waste of pantry resources if things go wrong) as well as being pleasantly quick to make (most are fully baked in one or two minutes and none take over 10 minutes to make from start to finish).  They may, but need not, contain an egg or part of an egg, and usually incorporate a small amount of baking powder to help them rise.  

Early 21st century life certainly explains the rising popularity of mug cakes, though The Food Timeline notes that cakes have been baked in teacups and similar small containers before now.  Wikipedia lumps mug cakes together with cupcakes, and it's certainly true that both are in the same size range.  The main difference is that cupcakes are usually baked in a conventional oven, often in quantities of a dozen at a time, while the beauty of mug cakes is that usually only one, or at most two to four, are made at a time so that the temptation to overindulge does not linger.  

My husband, who really likes certain kinds of cake but doesn't want to be taunted by a huge cake oversupply either, encouraged my exploration.  When my search turned up a peanut butter mug cake recipe on Kirbie's Cravings, I knew I had to give it a try.  

I followed the recipe with only two changes:  I used dark brown sugar instead of white, and I used only 3 1/4 tablespoons of it instead of the 4 tablespoons called for by the recipe.  I also used natural peanut butter instead of the Skippy peanut butter that Kirbie admitted she had used.  

The end result of my labors was, to me, a bit like magically transforming the peanut butter into a slightly dry cake that tasted exactly the same as the peanut butter.  I didn't care for it at first (it wasn't even slightly sweet), but the taste began to grow on me as I nibbled it.  Sadly, my husband didn't like the cake at all.  He said that he disliked its texture.  The texture reminded him of oatmeal, a food he hates precisely because he finds its texture revolting.  

However, there are legions of mug cake recipes on the Internet, and I have collected six or seven more recipes that I'm eager to try.  Because my husband and I both love carrot cake, a carrot cake in a mug will likely be next.  Watch this space!

Gingerbread!

Molded, gilded, & colored medieval-style
gingerbread in the form of a Tudor Rose.

Gingerbread by Tammy Crawford; Photo from GodeCookery.com

Gingerbread Men.  Photo by
alcinoe (originally from en.wikibooks,
transferred to Wikimedia Commons)

Cornish fairings.  Photo by foodista,
originally posted on Flickr

There are a combination of spices that so-called "First World" countries associate with the winter holidays, such as Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and Christmas.  If you are American, Canadian or British, you likely know what they are. They include ginger, cinnamon, black pepper and cloves.  Nutmeg, mace, and allspice later joined the list as Western explorers discovered them in Indonesia and the Caribbean.  

Today, these combinations of spices are associated in our minds with the flavor of pumpkin pie, spice cakes, and ... gingerbread! Gingerbread turns out to be a very changeable concept, assuming different forms in different periods.

During the high Middle Ages, gingerbread was not a bread, cake, or cookie.  It was a kind of sticky candy made with honey and bread crumbs, and flavored with the "holiday" spices we still use today.  The topmost photograph to the left above shows a molded shape made from this sort of "gingerbread".  Yet ginger came to Europe through Asian trade with the Mediterranean; it was already known and used in Ancient Rome, and certainly predates the Middle Ages.  Ginger was originally cultivated in Southeast Asia, and is believed to exist only as a cultigen, and not in a wild form.  So tracing the travels of ginger across the world doesn't really pin down how long "gingerbread" has existed, or even what forms it may have.

Nowadays, "gingerbread" might be a cookie, a hard biscuit, or a cake, and the various nations of Europe, as well as the English-speaking world, have their own characteristic forms of gingerbread; Wikipedia names a few of them here. American varieties often use molasses, a common sweetener in the United States that is a byproduct of the sugar cane processing process. 

Gingerbread cake with mountain cranberries
Photo: Johan Bryggare
(Wikimedia Commons)

But there is a lot of overlap between the forms of gingerbread, as I discovered when searching the Internet for information about ginger snaps the other day.  I think of "ginger snaps" as a hard crunchy cookie, that can range in form from wafer-thin to as much as a quarter-inch thick.  When I think of ginger snaps I think of a cookie made and sold in the Philadelphia area under the brand called Sweetzels.  Sweetzels actually sells similar cookies as "ginger snaps" and "spiced wafers"; the spiced wafers are easier to find where I live.

To my surprise, I learned that a type of cookie identical in appearance to the Sweetzels cookies is known in the United Kingdom as a "Cornish fairing" (see the second picture to the right).  A "fairing" is a treat sold at a country "fair", and fairs existed (and may still exist?) all over the United Kingdom.  The thick, ginger-flavored biscuit was characteristic of fairings sold in Cornwall in particular.

Much the same assortment of spices as have been used in gingerbreads have long been the key ingredients in pumpkin pie.  Nowadays these "pumpkin pie spices" are added to all kinds of foods, ranging from cereals to lattes.  That's done for one simple reason.  People like them, so they sell, or at least they sell in the fall and winter.  That likely means that gingerbread will never quite go away, because it has a similar flavor and invokes similar thoughts of celebration and holiday.  Meanwhile, I am planning to make a "gingerbread" cake for Christmas, in my slow cooker.  Sometimes, the more things change the more they remain the same.