Mug cake: the follow-up

In the name of journalism, Scooter and I made mug-cakes the other night at 2am. Rating: yes.

Success tastes chocolatey.

We used the recipe I posted previously, although we substituted melted salted butter for the oil, a recipe mod I endorse because (a), salted butter is a much more useful thing to buy than weird baking oil, and (b) the slight saltiness adds complexity to the flavour of the 5-minute microwaved mug cake. And snacks you make at 2am can always use more complexity, eh? Sometimes I take all the vowels out of the Alpha-Getti just for a challenge.

Another recipe mod I would endorse is using a wee bit more cocoa and a wee bit less flour- maybe altering the original recipe’s ratio by a tablespoon in each direction. That would make the cake denser and more chocolatety, both of which are good words in the dessert arena. A not-as-good word in the dessert arena is “obesity”, which can be “caused” by “late-night” “gluttony”.

Also: use a large mug.

Mixing batter in a mug is challenging, so use a fork (even though the sound of the fork-tines scraping the mug upsets some very primal part of my brain). And stir the dry ingredients well before adding the egg & butter, or else you end up with a layer of dry, unmixed flour at the bottom of your mug cake, like one of us did, and then the other of us (the one whose mom is a professional pastry chef) laughed at me and I hid in the bathroom.

I don’t know from baking but I did pick up some cake & pastry flour for the mug cake, and my cake rose pretty well. I suspect that using all-purpose flour might have a detrimental effect- the mug is so small that it’s hard to get bubbles into the batter by stirring- whereas cake flour is more encouraging, promoting better self-esteem in batter applications.

It will look like the mug can’t possibly hold all that mug-cake, but it probably will. Mine only overflowed by a couple drips, even though the uncooked batter reached right to the top. Yay uncritical optimism, I bet this means everything else will work out fine, too!

Also: don’t forget to buy some milk to wash down your epicurean genius.

And there we have it, folks: Mug-cake. Dee-licious.

Doctor, I don’t think he’s hungry.

It must be tough to work under life-or-death time constraints, hobbled by a language barrier. Add to that a measure of conceptual naïveté, and you’ve got a puzzling night in the emergency room. Here is an anglophone doctor’s account of using a professional medical translation service to inform an adult Spanish-speaking patient that he would require an appendectomy:

I hate using interpreters – especially the phone ones. It’s a cumbersome process of handing a phone back and forth…. [but nonetheless], I am fairly detailed and complex in the instructions and explanations I give patients, and I do not stint the non-english-speakers.

So for this patient, I explained what appendicitis was, that he would need surgery, described the surgery and recovery, and briefly outlined the potential complications…. All with the interpreter flawlessly going back and forth in the background. Finally, the translator broke the “fourth wall” and said to me, “Doctor, I am sorry to say that I do not think your patient understands what I am telling him. I explained that he would need surgery, and his response was, ‘I’ll eat anything you give me.’ So I tried to explain what an operation is, several times, and all he has to say is that he isn’t hungry but if you tell him he has to eat, he will eat anything you say. I am very sorry, but I really don’t think he understands.”

Huh. Full post is at All Bleeding Stops.

Ninja mediocrity

What we have here is a ninja who has poor ninja skillz.

From FailBlog.