Tasty Thursdays

Yes, it's Thursday again, so time for another recipe for you to try. After last week's fiddly recipe, I'm going to share with you something that's really quick and easy for those times which you want cake and you want it NOW!

Five minute chocolate mug cake

You will need:

• 1 mug
• 4 tablespoons plain flour
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa (don't use hot chocolate powder like I did, it doesn't taste great!)
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 3 tablespoons oil
• Optional extras: chocolate chips, peanut butter, jam, nutella etc
• Optional: cream to serve

Instructions

1. Mix dry ingredients together with a fork.
2. Add the egg, and mix well.
3. Add the milk and oil, and mix well.
4. Add in any optional extras.
5. Microwave on 1000 watts for three minutes. The cake will rise over the top of the mug, so don't be alarmed!
6. Leave to cool for 2 minutes.
7. Add cream if desired. Enjoy!

Tasty Thursdays

I've decided to christen Thursdays Tasty Thursdays in order to share some of my favourite recipes and treats. For my first Tasty Thursday, I'm going to share something I made last summer at uni with one of my volunteers.

Cake pops (from Bakerella)

As you can see from the website linked above, you can get really creative with your cake pops, depending on your skill and patience. For our first attempt though, we decided to keep it simple!

The finished product

You will need:

• Sponge cake (we used ready-made plain sponge cake from the supermarket, but you could make your own in whatever flavour you fancy)
• Buttercream icing (Again, we were lazy and used ready-made plain buttercream icing/frosting, but like before you can make your own in whatever flavour you like)
•  Decorations: chocolate, icing pens etc
• Kebab sticks/lollipop sticks
• Something you can use to stand the sticks in (we found a chunk of polystyrene which worked quite well)

Instructions: 

1. Chop up the sponge cake into chunks and combine it with the buttercream icing - you're aiming for a mouldable consistency which isn't too wet.

Me chopping the cake (with ridiculously frizzy hair, sorry!)

2. Mould into balls and spear on a stick, using a touch of melted chocolate (whatever type you're using to coat the entire pop). We used the non-pointy end of the kebab stick so we could use the pointy end to stand them in the polystyrene.

3. Chill. We were impatient so shoved them in the freezer for 20 minutes or so, and they seemed to be okay.

4. Decorate. We melted some white chocolate in a shallow bowl to coat them and then drizzled some milk chocolate on some for a marbled effect. We also used icing pens to decorate. The weight of the chocolate is sometimes an issue at this point, so keep your fingers crossed they stay on the sticks, as we had a few casualties!

Starting to decorate

Happy cake pop!

Cake pop casualty :(

Punk!

Happy baking!

My first post

Hi blog world! This is my first post on my blog (kinda redundant as you can obviously see that!). Anyway welcome to my blog, a random look into the world of a disabled student with a bizarre sense of humour. If you want to know a bit more about me, take a look at the tabs around the top, which have a bit about my blog and my disability. If you have any more questions though or want any pictures of my equipment, post a comment and I'll reply or update the relevant page.

I guess I should tell you what I did today. Me and my volunteer decided we were bored and wanted to make some sort of cake. This was a good idea to me, as it seemed a good procrastination from my essay (not in until 1st April - deadline not near enough to put on enough pressure for me to knuckle down yet!). We did a bit of googling and found this - a fourteen layer sponge cake with chocolate filling. Thinking fourteen layers was a bit ambitious, we aimed for around six.

Four hours and seven thin layers of sponge later, this is the final result: