Cooking For Two

Have a craving for chocolate? Here’s the answer! It’s so simple you’ll be amazed. All you need is a coffee mug, a few ingredients and a microwave and you have hot, steamy, gooey chocolate bliss in about 5 minutes. The best part? It’s not as bad for you as you think!

Ingredients:

1 8oz microwave safe coffee mug
4 tbs white whole wheat flour
4 tbs white sugar (or brown sugar but omit the vanilla)
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbs mini chocolate chips
1 tbs ground flax seed
3 tbs boiling water
4 tbs milk
1 tsp oil
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Mix the flax meal and boiling water and set aside. Mix all dry ingredients well in the mug, add chocolate chips and mix well. Add flax meal mixture and liquid ingredients to dry ingredients in mug. Mix well. Microwave on high for 2.5 - 3 minutes. Cake is done when it stops rising in the mug. Tip out onto a plate (yep, it falls right out) and enjoy! This is perfect for two people with a scoop of ice cream, or one person, with a hearty appetite.

Now this will rise and may even overflow. If it spills over the sides of the mug you used too much baking powder, if it doesn’t rise very much you used too little.

This recipe was adapted from one I found elsewhere. It called for an egg, but I found a whole egg in one mug was too much egg. So I tweaked it and used flax as a binder and the baking powder as a leavening agent.

The other day I was reading a post on a cooking blog I recently discovered. On her site Ari had a recipe for Marble Molasses Pound Cake from a cookbook she had. It sounded divine! And of course, me being me, I had to experiment with it. Unfortunately, or should I say, fortunately, it didn’t quite work out as planned. To begin with, I had no eggs… Read the rest of this entry »

They look good, don’t they? Know what else thinks they look good? Your heart! These cookies have little sugar in them and lots of whole grains. This recipe makes 6 dozen, but don’t let that fool you, that’s for the two-bite version. If you make regular sized cookies you’ll probably get around half that. Either way it’s a lot of cookies, but it’s a lot of good stuff too. And they’re great with coffee! Read the rest of this entry »

My husband adores banana pudding. His dad made it frequently when he was growing up. I like it myself so I decided to try to cobble together a relatively healthy version. It’s virtually fat free, but does have a decent amount of simple carbs, so go easy on it nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I was browsing recipes online, as I’m wont to do, when I came across this recipe for Lemon Cream Cake. It sounded fantastic, but very unhealthy, so I decided to try to make it healthier while still retaining the luscious decadence of cake. If the fact that half the thing was gone in the first day is any indication, I think I was pretty successful. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know you can make your own trail mix with better ingredients for a lot less than the pre-bagged stuff? It’s tastier too. There’s nothing I hate more than getting a bag of trail mix with stale nuts or rock hard fruit. Yuck! Read the rest of this entry »