by Shilpa Saravanan, editor-in-chief & Annie Zhang, executive editor

We’re back with the ultimate dessert for the time-conscious — ooey-gooey chocolate mug cakes!

The snickerdoodles from last time took a while, we’ll admit. There must be people who can whip up a batch in less than an hour — less than half that, even. Unfortunately, we’re not among them. Mug cakes, though. They’re infinitely adaptable. They don’t take your entire night to make. You don’t have to hide the rest of the servings to make sure you don’t eat them all, because there’s only one. Mug cakes are for rugged individualists… or, you know, people without friends with whom they can share baked goods. Mug cakes are the future.

After going through pages and pages of recipes that involved a) bad reviews, b) suspiciously few ingredients or c) suspiciously numerous ingredients, we decided to follow a recipe for “The Moistest Chocolate Mug Cake” from Table for Two.

(That’s right, no eggs. One wonders why it’s so hard for people to realize that an entire egg is far too much for a single- or double-serving cake if it’s enough for, well, a decuple-serving cake. Your precious mug cake will turn into an actual sponge if you use an egg.)

Oh, we made some substitutions: neither of us had any of the so-called “hazelnut chocolate spread” (just say it: NUTELLA), so we used peanut butter instead, with very peanut butter-y results. In hindsight, we might’ve added that optional extra tablespoon of sugar.

This is so easy: whisk the dry ingredients together, whisk the wet ingredients in, plop in the nut butter, done. The batter will be tempting. Try not to eat it; a “lil spoonful” is a much larger percentage of a mug than of a big 13×9 pan (see: common justifications of the progressive income tax). We succeeded mightily at not licking more than the whisk, so you should be fine.

The cake took us 71 seconds in the microwave, because Annie’s not one for round numbers. Thankfully, it did not explode. After poking the super-soft center with a chopstick a few times, we deemed it finished and promptly dug in. No cooling or cutting necessary. Remind us why we don’t eat these all the time?

It’s not pretty! We’ll admit it! (Perhaps if you use a shorter mug, the cake will form a cute little dome.) But the texture is to die for.

The Cool Whip is optional, but not really.