Instant Chocolate Mug Cake Mix (with extra cocoa)

A friend of mine complained to me one day that she was craving cake while at work, but there was no place nearby to get any. Can you imagine a sadder predicament? Cake should always be accessible, especially at work!

I immediately set to work looking for solutions for her, and came across a much-pinned recipe for a “just add water” microwaved mug cake. According to numerous sources, if you combine a box of angel food cake mix and a box of any other flavor cake mix, you can add water to the resulting mixture and microwave it for an instant mug cake. Apparently it’s something to do with the egg white content in the angel food cake that allows this to work, though I had my doubts. I had to try it.

Japanese Skyline Cake (With Microwaved Lemon Curd)

For my last project for the ninja baby shower I made a cake. The mother-to-be had requested bright, punchy flavors, so I went with a lemon cake using my hot milk sponge cake as a base, filled with a fantastically easy homemade lemon curd (recipe below, and it’s the creamiest, most luscious lemon curd ever) and iced with my favorite cooked-flour frosting. Then it was time to decorate!

I knew I wanted something special to tie in to the ninja theme, but just piping little ninjas or sticking the ninja cookies to the outside of the cake seemed boring, so I went in a little more sophisticated direction. I printed out some reference images of Japanese temples, and sketched them (interspersed with trees and a bridge) onto long, skinny pieces of parchment paper. I flipped the paper over (didn’t want graphite in my cake), and carefully traced out the design with melted dark chocolate in a squeeze bottle (a little less precise than I’d have hoped, but not bad). Then came the tricky part…