Let’s not kid ourselves–chocolate cake that takes three minutes to bake in the microwave is only meant to be consumed out of desperation in the midst of a munchies crisis in the hours between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Or by obese people at any time. And yet my dear friend Emily, who was experiencing neither of these, asked to make it in celebration of her birth.

She sent me a link to the recipe for Chocolate Cake in Five Minutes! Monday at work, and we went out before lunch and tried to procure all of the necessary supplies at one of the delis downtown, which is no small feat if you know New York City and its tiny stores. We knew we weren’t going to find the cake flour, so we went looking for cornstarch to add to regular flour like someone suggested in the comments, but they didn’t have that except in huge bags in the back, so one of the guys had to bring us a little takeout soup container full of it. They didn’t have the cocoa, either, so we bought some packets of pre-melted Nestle’s (what?). And then we gathered everything else and went back to the office to experiment.

Surprisingly, what came out was actually very much cake. The moistest chocolate cake you’ve ever seen, at that. It wasn’t quite as sweet or as chocolatety as we would’ve liked it, but we more than made up for that by slathering it in Nutella, chocolate icing, and peanut butter. Even better than the taste, though, was watching it rise in the microwave. For the first minute, it seemed to do nothing. But at the start of the second minute, it lifted straight out of the mug like a tower and then kept on rising almost completely to the top of the microwave before it got too tall to hold itself upright and leaned off the side of the cup at an angle. As soon as we opened the microwave door, though, it sunk right back down to the top of the mug.

Pleased with our work, we then decided to microwave not just a mug but an entire mixing bowl of the stuff. And here’s the result, melted knife and all: