Rice of the fallen

Just to set things clear here, I have cooked rice before, and it turned out to be great. It's just that I have a really bad memory, and sometimes when I forget things, I tend to procreate instead of just looking it up, partially because I love to experiment, but mostly because I'm just too lazy to look it up!

So cooking rice is simple right? You just have to add water, boil it, add some more, lower the temperature, and wait... or was the adding water part after that? meah I'm sure it's just a tiny detail that would'nt matter... or is it ?

It was when the rice went yellow and had this really weird form that I first suspected it, and of course the burning smell helped as well.

I kept going on just to see what might happen, but I still had my suspicious as the rice slowly turned brownish and smoke filled the kitchen...

I got some of it on a plate and despite it's *ehm* not so nice appearance, I thought it could still be saved; it just had too much water in it...

So I figured after I went this far I can't just give up that easily...

Microwave!! The best solution to dry up anything… well, almost anything...

And there's always that other solution...

And finally I decided to cook something a little bit less sophisticated

What really happened, is that I was busy doing something else, and it got burned, I looked up the right way to do it, and I knew I completely messed up the order, so I figured what the hell, I might as well try it to the end and have fun shooting it :D

And also I didn’t end up eating an apple, I made pane fish sticks with molten cheddar cheese in Arabian bread, but that wasn’t funny to shoot, so I decided to shoot the apple instead :D

Chocolate 3akation

In all my life I haven’t seen anyone who hates chocolate (except perhaps 1 friend who has told me otherwise, but to this moment I am 80% sure he was lying, because come ‘on… who hates chocolate?).

After we’ve established that we all love chocolate, chocolate makes you happy, bla bla bla… But some of us are particularly insane about it (like rob a chocolate bank if they made one insane), and I just happen to be one of those.

So today, after eating some chocolate Ice-cream I went on the interwebs (that’s the nickname of the internet) on a chocolate carving quest, and I found a blog entry named “5-Minute Chocolate Cake in a Mug”… Putting everything aside, anything that got “5-minute” and “chocolate” in one sentence you must defiantly count me in.

Instructions were simple, put these stuff in a mug and heat it for 2 minutes in the microwave oven… simple, right?

3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 egg
3 tablespoons milk
1.5 tablespoons oil
handful of chocolate chips
splash of vanilla extract

Well first of all I don’t like to work with a tablespoon… so I went ahead and got the equivalent measure with teaspoons (1 tablespoon ~= 2.7 teaspoon), so I converted everything to teaspoons and mixed the whole thing in the mug, it was a little thick so you need to mix harder…

Now everything was going well, the taste and smell were delicious, but I don’t know where it went wrong and I got this:

I may have put too much baking powder, or the mug was too small (the title clearly stated it was a standard sized mug)… maybe next time I will try it in a bigger bowl, and maybe add more milk…

Anyway appearances can be deceiving, so I emptied mug and left the cake to cool down, and surprise surprise… it was delicious!! It may not seem like it, but trust me it was, and not just because I’m a chocolate maniac… I would defiantly recommend it… but maybe with those little tweaks:

-bigger bowl

-less cocoa powder

-more salt (don’t know why but it didn’t make any difference, maybe if we add more we’ll know why they put it :D)

-more milk

-more heat (i.e time)

-add some topping (I added bananas later because that’s what I found, but try something more wet)

-go with the tablespoon, I think it’s the teaspoon that blew everything up :D

Just as a reference, here’s the original post I took the recipe from:

http://jasonlow08.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/5-minute-chocolate-cake-in-a-mug/