Cake in a Mug!

Today, Krista introduced me to the website moredesignplease.com, so all I've been doing this evening is looking at all of the posts, links, etc. and adding them to my Pinterest. I did stumble upon one idea, however, that needed to be immediately dealt with. Cake in a Mug! 

The ingredients were all simple items that most anyone would have on hand.

4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional? ya right.)
A splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug

First, all of the dry ingredients were mixed well in the coffee mug. I added the egg and mixed well and then added the milk and oil. After the mixture was homogeneous, I added the chocolate chips and vanilla extract. 

I gave the batter a final mix and cooked it for 3.5 minutes in the microwave. The cake cooled for a few minutes and I then added icing and some chocolate chips!

I can't say that this is the most delicious treat I've ever had, in fact I would say a fair comparison would be a TV dinner brownie. That being said, it took all of about 5 minutes to make and would probably be a really fun activity to do with kids. While probably pointless, I still like the idea of eating cake out of a mug.

Here's the original posting as well as a picture of a more tasty looking version: Cake in a Mug! 

Pessssto!

In an attempt to have fun/not spend too much money/make something delish, Smorgan and I set out to make a batch of pesto!

 We purchased:

 

(For future reference, we will find a substitute for the $6 pine nuts. They weren't bad, but didn't add $6 worth of flavor.)

Picked some:

from Smorgan and Priscilla's stashes, borrowed Priscilla's food processor and got to work!

We used: 

2 Cups of fresh basil

1.5 cloves of garlic

2/3 Cup of Pine Nuts

1/3 Cup olive oil

 

Primarily using the "pulse" setting, we mixed our ingredients until the basil, garlic and pine nuts were a mostly homogeneous mixture. Afterward, we added 1/4 Cup grated Parmesan which aided in thickening our pesto as well as soaking up some of the oil that seemed excessive. 

This was the part of the day when the garbage disposal drain got clogged, Smorgan had to plunge the sink and said "don't put up a picture of this."

We each made our own batches of pesto and had beautiful, green, garlic-ey/basil goodness to devour! 

Every bit of my pesto was used to construct pesto-grilled cheese sandwiches. They were delicious and reason enough to make more pesto in the future! "But you don't have to take my word for it..."