The holidays are synonymous with lots of delicious freshly baked goods. Pies, cakes, brownies, and of course, cookies all taste even more delicious when it's cold out and you want to just sit around inside and eat. Of course, the holidays are also usually associated with a little bit of weight gain due in part to this. That whole tray of chocolate chip cookies isn’t going to eat itself! Luckily, if you don’t want to spend an afternoon making a full batch of cookies or an entire cake just to satisfy your sweet tooth, there’s a far quicker and just as tasty option.
Mug cakes are super simple recipes that require just a handful of ingredients and can be cooked in the microwave in 1-2 minutes. We originally started making these as quick and tasty low calorie treats as part of bodybuilding prep but there are limitless ways to make these. Here are two examples, the first being more on the lighter side and the second more dense (both physically and calorically).
Lemon Protein Mug Cake
Meg’s Recipe
Dry Ingredients
3 Tbsp whole wheat flour
1.5 Tbsp stevia
1 Tbsp white cake protein powder (we used Denovo Nutrition)
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
Wet Ingredients
1 Tbsp lemon juice
3 Tbsp egg whites
1 dash lemon extract
3 Tbsp 0% fat Greek yogurt
Protein Frosting
1/2 scoop vanilla frosting
2 Tbsp 0% Greek yogurt or cottage cheese
1 Tbsp lemon juice
Spray the inside of a coffee mug with non-stick cooking spray. Mix all of the dry ingredients together. In a separate mug, mix all of the wet ingredients. Add dry ingredients to mug and mix. Microwave for 90 seconds and voila! You can obviously opt to create the protein frosting pictured by simply mixing the ingredients together, or top with anything else you like!
Peanut Butter Protein Mug Cake
Grant’s Recipe
Dry Ingredients
3 Tbsp white flour
1 tsp cane sugar
2 Tbsp candy bar protein powder (Denovo Nutrition again)
pinch of salt
Wet Ingredients
1 Tbsp almond milk
1 whole egg
3 Tbsp 0% fat Greek yogurt
Follow the same instructions as other recipe except microwave for 90 seconds and then an additional 30 seconds. I topped with a dollop of peanut butter and some peanuts. We were out of cocoas powder, but I was planning in mixing in a teaspoon of that to the dry ingredients as well.
Here are a few suggestions on how to customize these mug cakes to your liking:
- Feel free to sub in any other flours you like (cashew, almond, coconut, etc.) but the further you stray away from white flour, the dryer these will be.
- The protein powder is obviously optional, if you are adding protein powder try to use one that has a gram or two of fat and a few grams of carbs. Powders with only a gram or two of carbs and no fat are much dryer and in turn will make the cake dryer.
- Similarly, using an egg's worth of egg whites vs. a whole egg will also yield a dryer cake. When it comes down to it, the more fat you add to the cake the moister it will get. The peanut butter cake was much much gooier than the lemon one, as you can see I used a whole egg vs whites, and DeNovo changed its protein formula to have a little fat since we first made the lemon cakes, so these had about 6g more fat. I also did not add an baking powder which made a big difference in consistency.
- If you find a dry ingredient base that you like, you could add all the dry ingredients and measure the total volume, and then scale this however you liked to store the ingredients together and then just take a scoop of the total volume of dry ingredients each time you want to make one of these to save even more time!
Give one of these recipes a shot, then try experimenting on your own and posting your recipes in the comments.
