Chocolate mug cake!

Oh yes, I've got a blog here haven't I...

Anyway, over Christmas I was given an instant-chocolate-brownie-in-a-mug kit which made quite good chocolatey goodness, and unlike my previous mug cake attempts did not result in cakeapocalypse.

Unlike all the other mug cake recipes I've found it doesn't include egg in the ingredients, so today I thought I'd have a go at reverse-engineering the recipe. The ingredients list on the kit was basically sugar, self-raising flour, chocolate chunks, and cocoa powder, with butter and milk added to make it up. So based on that and other recipes online I've guessed equal parts sugar, self-raising flour and chocolate. The rest mostly followed the recipe on the tub, and ended up being more-or-less:

1. Put 15g butter in a mug and microwave for 10-20 seconds until melted
2. Add 15g sugar, 15g self-raising flour, 15g cocoa powder, a few chocolate chunks, and 30ml milk. Mix well.
3. Microwave for 60-90 seconds
4. Let it stand for 5 minutes

The result: a sort of chocolate muffin in the mug. It came out a bit dry with a hint of baking powder aftertaste, which I think is more down to me not getting the mixture right than anything else. I'm using mechanical scales with 25g divisions, so measuring things this small is tricky, and I think I ended up adding too much flour! Next time I'll just measure everything out in teaspoons instead of by mass.

On the plus side, cakeapocalypse did not occur!

Nintendo Labo VR

My latest silly toy: Nintendo Labo VR! Surprisingly good, given that it's basically Google Cardboard with a not-particularly-high DPI display (6.2" 1280x720 display giving 237dpi - for comparison my Sony Xperia XZ1 has a 5.2" 1920x1080 display giving 424dpi). I think it works because of rather than in spite of the low resolution - because the pixels are visible, it's not trying to be ultra-realistic and so doesn't fall into uncanny valley territory.

That said, it's really disconcerting watching a first-person VR video of someone eating sushi.

Actually buying it was full of hilarious fail - I pre-ordered it direct from Nintendo just in time to get it on launch day (so I thought) but then the tracking code got stuck on "Sender preparing item". So I messaged a few days after the estimated delivery date and they quickly responded first saying it was delayed, then saying that it was lost in transit and they'd refund me. The refund arrived... and then the tracking code updated as Royal Mail finally received the parcel. It eventually turned up and there was a bit of back-and-forth between myself and Nintendo support to work out how to actually pay for it ("it's arrived", "we're sorry to hear that it was damaged", "it's undamaged, but arrived after you refunded me", "ah. Erm. Have you got a PayPal account we can bill?").