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It’s That Simple is our series about recipes so easy, you can make them with your eyes closed. Think tiny ingredient lists, laid-back techniques, and results so delicious you’ll text home about them.
There are many takes on mug cakes out there, but this truly pantry-friendly version is one you’ll want to save. It’s egg-free, but that’s a deliberate move. Without an egg, the crumb is loose and delicate, leaving the cake with a pudding-like center that allows the intensity of the cocoa powder to shine through. It delivers all the vibes of chocolate cake—rich, sticky, satisfying—with barely any effort.
The culture of sweet treats has long prized portability and immediacy—from Depression-era fudge cooked in college dorms to the 90’s boom of packaged, snack-size candies, to today’s dopamine hits in the form of 30-second recipe shorts. The mug cake fits neatly into this lineage, a miracle of the microwave-era innovations of the late 20th century with an enduring legacy.
Perhaps the most important thing in the making of this mug cake is harnessing the transformative precision offered by your microwave’s power button. Cooking the cake at 50 percent power ensures it’s cooked through but moist from edge to center, with little to no risk of erupting out of the mug. Just one more reason why this mug cake is different from other recipes out there.
Now that you have warm cake, you can go the extra mile and dollop on some whipped cream, a scoop of ice cream, or rainbow sprinkles (most welcome in my book). The joy of this cake is its immediacy—a sweet treat that you can make faster than you can decide what to watch on the telly.
Yes, it’s a shortcut in a microwave. It’s also a gooey, fudgy, wildly good chocolate cake.
