Recipe Review: FitWaffle's Speculoos Mug Cake

Are these social media recipes what they are cut out to be?

I have been seeing FitWaffle all over my Instagram account for the last 6 months. She makes desserts look so easy - often with 2 - 3 ingredient recipes. Many things on IG look good, but do they taste good? Not always, as I have learnt.

Recently, I have had many clients come through who share that they have been unsuccessful at learning to cook via YouTube, which is why they come to classes. It is important to note that ultimately, recipes are only a guide. For beginner cooks, I completely understand how you would follow a recipe to-the-tee, to yield the best results possible. I, myself, was once a beginner cook and had to follow recipes religiously. If there was one item from the ingredients list that I did not have, I HAD to either rush out to get it, or abandon the recipe altogether. I still cook a lot from recipes, but my approach is a lot more casual than before. I read a recipe and can now quickly work out what are the key ingredients that make the dish, and everything else, I can either use alternatives or omit.

So, I took out FitWaffle’s (Eloise Head) cookbook “Baking it Easy” from the library some weeks ago, hoping to be inspired by some easy recipes / baking hacks for kids classes. So far, I have tried out two recipes, and they have both been just okay. Her recipe for Speculoos Mug Cake calls for equal parts of speculoos butter, plain flour and milk, with a pinch of baking powder. Pop them all into a big, stir well with a fork, and microwave for 1 min and 20 seconds.

My microwave wasn't quite as powerful as hers, so it tool me about 3 mins to get the mug cake to cook through. It looked gooey and moist when you first take it out from the microwave, but eating my way though it revealed that the cake was way too dry and needed a bit more milk. Because this recipe didn’t have an egg it it, it also lacked a bit of structure and richness that other mug cake recipes have. It wasn’t a bad cake. It just wasn’t a good cake. It could be easily rectified with a huge dollop of ice-cream over it.

Because the purpose of many these social media recipes are design to capture your attention in the first 6 seconds, there is not a lot of time to break down the science behind cooking, and particularly, with baking.

I will try a few more recipes from the book before I have to turn the book in to the library. I hope I am a bit more successful with the rest.