Emergency chocolate cake...

My sister is a bad influence. Not only does she force me to drink lots of wine (forces me, I tell you!) but she also leads me into chocolatey temptation. She's staying with me this weekend, and last night the after-dinner conversation turned to the fact that we both fancied something sweet and chocolatey. 'If only you weren't so difficult,' I said, 'we could go to Tesco and buy a massive chocolate cake'. And then she mentioned making one of those microwave-cake-in-a-mug recipes that swept the internet a while back, and that was it. I had all the ingredients in the house, so we went for it.

Of course, in our wisdom we thought 'Hang on, if that recipe is for one mug that's never going to be enough - we'll double the recipe and make it in a little mixing bowl'. And my goodness, did it ever work - we ended up with the most incredible chocolate cake with a molten chocolate sauce middle. All those Masterchef contestants who have failed with their chocolate fondants need to take note - microwave baking is the way forward! We used Doves Farm gluten-free flour and Oatly oat milk, and it didn't taste remotely gluten-and-dairy-free. Amazing.

Surprisingly enough I don't have a photo, because we ate the lot.

Emergency chocolate microwave cake

Ingredients (this is our doubled recipe):

8 tablespoons plain flour
8 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa
About half a teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
6 tablespoons milk
6 tablespoons oil

Instructions:

1. Mix flour, sugar, cocoa and baking powder in a small mixing bowl
2. Whisk in eggs, milk and oil
3. Microwave for 2:30 on maximum power (800watt) - watch it, you want the edges to be cooked but the middle still liquid
4. Devour straight out of the bowl with a big spoon

I think it'd be amazing done in individual ramekins - they'd probably take only a minute or so in the microwave. It'd probably serve at least four people if you did it like that - doubling the recipe made a quite obscenely vast amount of cake!