4 minute microwave cake

Today I finished decorating Miss T's birthday cake for her 2nd birthday tomorrow. As I was fed up of having to search for my scrap of paper with the microwave cake recipe each time I want to bake a cake, I thought I would type it up here so I could find it easily in future!

Before I had kids I had NEVER baked a cake and the thought of baking one terrified me. For J's first birthday I discovered that everyone else seemed to know how to make cakes and there seemed to be this expectation that you should bake a cake for your child's birthday. I felt a failure.

For his second birthday, I still couldn't bake a cake but I did decorate a pre-iced cake with a teddy bears picnic design spending hours each evening modelling bears, mini cakes, and sandwiches out of icing. It did actually look impressive but alas I still hadn't baked the actual cake.

Then I came across a microwave cake recipe and so long as I could come up with a design that was bowl shaped I could make a cake and decorate it myself. So I managed to make elephants, bears, tomliboo bushes, octopus, turtle and barbie cakes using my microwave cake (I will one day try to dig out photos from some of these to share but don't have a clue where they are right now).

The huge advantage of a microwave cake is that it is mega quick to cook. This one cooks in 4 minutes. The other advantage is that you can use any microwaveable bowl to cook it in. Silicone cake 'tins' also seem to work well. Just remember to NEVER use metal in the microwave!

Ingredients:
125g butter or margarine (we often use Stork)
125g caster sugar
125g self-raising flour
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp baking powder

Method:
1. Grease the microwaveable bowl or dish you are using.

2. Beat together the butter/marg and sugar. You can do this by hand or use a mixer. Then add the eggs and vanilla essence and a little of the flour.

3. Fold in the rest of the self-raising flour and baking powder. Again you can do this by hand or on the slow setting of the mixer.

4. Pour into the dish/bowl and microwave for 4 minutes on full power. Leave it to cool (for at least 10 minutes) before turning out. Just like with a regular cake, you can always use a skewer to check if it is cooked through. If the skewer comes out clean, it is cooked. If it comes out with cake mixture on it, you'll need to cook for a little bit longer (I would say in 30 second bursts and then check so that you don't burn the cake).

They don't look like the most impressive of cakes but once decorated, you can get them to look good!

A useful tip a friend told me related to baking cakes is that an egg is around 2ozs. So generally you need equal amounts of flour, butter, sugar and egg so if you can increase / decrease the amount you make once you know an egg is equivalent to 2oz. The 125g used in this recipe is the equivalent of 4oz, hence 2 eggs required.