30 second rule

Whew! This cracker with Amaltheia Organic Dairy cheese
landed upright on the floor! I can still eat it!

If you dont know the 5-second rule, someone is bound to tell you about it at the crucial moment: when you drop food, if you pick it up within 5 seconds, its still safe to eat.

Right?

Now we have a handy flow chart -- The 30-Second Rule, A Decision Tree, created by Audrey Fukman and Andy Wright at SFoodie -- to help us figure out whether it really is safe to eat that dropped food.

Click to enlarge the following photo.

(This blog entry is a public service of Yummy Montana.)

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Chocolate cake oh yeah!

To give me energy to dig out of the snow thats been drifting around here, I decided to try the Kings Cupboard Rich and Dreamy Molten Chocolate Cake Mix that I happened to have in my own cupboard.

Kings Cupboard products are made in Red Lodge. The mixes Ive tried are very simple ones, so if youre in a hurry or just want to pull something together quickly, they are perfect. (And by the way, they also make chocolate and caramel sauces, which you will want to eat straight out of the jar -- haha!)

Alas, not everything is foolproof, as I discovered when I eagerly pulled my molten cakes out of the oven. But lets start at the beginning . . .

The basic recipe is: pour cake mix (containing chocolate bits), along with butter, into a pan and stir until everything is melted. The box tells you to divide the batter equally among 8 ramekins. "How big??!!" I cried. Are ramekins supposed to be a standard size?

On a baking sheet I set out four 6-ounce and two 8-ounce Pyrex custard cups, figuring those ought to hold the batter one way or another. I have pretty made-in-France 4-ounce ramekins but didnt want to mess with them for this "how much batter does this make anyway" experiment.

Conclusion: I now figure the 8 ramekins could be 4-ounce or 6-ounce size, so take note of that when you try the mix yourself.

After the suggested time of about 10 minutes, the cakes werent done, so I let them bake another 5 minutes. I dont know exactly when "molten" becomes "cake," but 15 minutes was too long. The cakes were delicious, but not molten.

The directions explain exactly how to check for moltenness, and I suggest doing so every minute or so after the suggested baking time. They also fairly warn that if you do not serve them right away, they will continue cooking inside and become cakey. This is not bad -- the taste is deep, rich chocolate; sort of like a cake-like candy bar -- but you will have to buy another mix and try again to enjoy the molten version.

I leave you with a photo of how these cakes are supposed to look, according to the company Web site.

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