Microwave Mug Cake

Hello!

I love cake (well, muffins and brownies and such). It’s one of my favorite foods! Back when I was little and lived with my parents, we didn’t eat much of it. My mom wasn’t a fabulous baker, so she bought cake mixes. My parents are also frugal, so these premade mixes were a rare treat. Typical cake isn’t healthy either, so that also played a part in it being a rare treat.
After living on my own and learning that I need to cut gluten out of my diet, I decided that I wanted to make cake-like things for myself. But, along with cutting out gluten, I needed to cut out eggs and the majority of refined sugar out of my diet. Plus, I wanted the cakes I ate to be healthy enough that I could eat them every day. That’s a tall order to make cakes that are gluten-free, egg-free, sugar-free, and relatively healthy. Those things don’t even fit in the definition of a typical cake!

But, I’ve managed to find a few recipes over the years. One of the tricks I’ve found is to begin by looking at bodybuilder or keto dessert recipes. I usually need to slightly modify them, but these are great places to start! Keto recipes usually have more oil than I want to put in my recipes, but they are already made without gluten or sugar. And bodybuilder recipes usually have little to no sugar, oil, or flour. And any that is present is in such a small quantity that it can almost always be substituted for without hurting the recipe integrity.

My favorite recipe right now is for a chocolate microwave cake. It’s mostly oatmeal, and I eat it for breakfast a lot.
For the base of the recipe (I like to pre-mix this in bulk to keep on hand), you’ll need:
-2/3 c oat flour
-1/3 c rice flour (brown will be more filling, but do whatever you want)
-1 Tbsp granulated sugar (optional)
-6-8 Tbsp stevia/Splenda/other sugar substitute

Then you can change the flavor to either chocolate or peanut butter (and maybe other flavors, but I haven’t tried them)
For chocolate:
-1-1.5 Tbsp cocoa
-1 Tbsp powdered milk/coffee creamer/nothing if you like dark chocolate

For peanut butter, add nothing right now. Once it is cooked and hot, stir in a glob of peanut butter (or sunflower butter if you can’t eat peanuts, like me)

Either way, add:
-1/2 tsp coconut/other oil
-enough hot water to mix everything (this isn’t that much water – always start with less and add more if needed)
And microwave for 1 minute.

The base of this recipe is 500 calories! If you make the chocolate version of this, that only adds (maybe) 30 calories. And you get over a cup of cake. And it’s mostly oatmeal and sugar-free. And it’s easy to make when you’re half awake and stumbling.
Oh, and it has at least (like, you use white rice flour and make the chocolate cake) 11g protein. That’s not bad for a cake.

I have a few other cake/dessert recipes that I really enjoy, and I will definitely link to them in the future. I do have a post already about some dessert recipes that contain beans (which aren’t too shabby-beans can be a cheap way to add moisture, protein, and bulk to a recipe).