Protein Mug Cake

This delicious vanilla protein mug cake is a great dessert alternative for those who want to meet high protein daily nutrition goals. The addition of a chocolate chip protein cookie adds extra flavor and even more protein. Ready in 2 minutes from start to finish!

This post contains sponsored content in collab with Naked Nutrition. Any opinions expressed about any products are my own and not influenced by this collab.

How Is This Different From Other Mug Cakes?

Mug cakes are a dessert lovers dream. When you want cake and you want it now, whipping up a 2-minute mug cake is kind of amazing. While most mug cakes use smaller proportions of typical cake ingredients, this protein mug cake incorporates the use of protein powder in place of some of the flour to add additional protein and lower the carbs a little bit.

What is the Texture Like?

Most mug cakes get a bad rap for being tough and spongy. And honestly, it's understandable. Making a cake requires many steps with special care required to keep the finished cake light and fluffy instead of dense and tough. When throwing together a 2-minute mug cake that's cooked in the microwave, you have to make some concessions as far as texture.

What I've done to help combat the texture problem is use less egg. Most mug cakes call for an entire egg to be added to the mug. When you think about it, some cake or cookie recipes use only a couple of eggs for the entire recipe, so one whole egg for one little mug is a lot!

Instead, I added the egg to the mug, whisked it up, and then scooped out half of it to allow the cake to be a little fluffier. It really does help.

Ingredient Substitutions

There's several ingredient substitutions you can use in this protein mug cake in case you don't have the listed ingredients in your pantry. Just be aware that any substitution you use will change the listed nutrition facts estimates shown in the recipe card below

• Milk - I used unsweetened almond milk, but any type of milk, dairy or non dairy, will work in this mug cake.
• Brown Sugar - depending on your nutritional needs, you can use real brown sugar or any brown sugar (or regular sugar) substitute. You just need to add a bit of sweetness to the cake, so just about anything will work here.
• Oil - I used canola oil because that's what I had on hand, but you can use coconut oil, vegetable oil, or melted butter.
• Protein Powder - Use any flavor you want! I referenced a "scoop" of protein powder in the recipe, which is about 2.5 tablespoons. Or you can use a food scale to measure out 30 grams.
• Topping - instead of the chocolate chip protein cookie you can use half of a crumbled protein bar, some nuts, a spoon of natural peanut butter, or some dark chocolate chips.

Naked Nutrition Naked Cookies

I had a chance to try these new protein cookies by Naked Nutrition and incorporate them as a topping into this protein mug cake. These cookies are fantastic! They're super thick, soft, and of course quite tasty. Each cookie has 200 calories, 10 grams of protein, 1 gram of sugar, and 8 grams of net carbs. They are also gluten free, for those requiring such a diet, being made from defatted almond flour instead of traditional wheat. 

The cookies come in three flavors currently - chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and sugar cookie. You can use any of the three flavors to crumble into your protein mug cake. I used chocolate chip! You can purchase the cookies from Amazon if you want to try them for yourself!

Other Mug Cake Toppings

This is a great base recipe for protein mug cake that you can use to flavor up with any number of tasty toppings!

• Naked Cookie - I used a chocolate chip Naked Cookie, but they also have oatmeal raisin and sugar cookie flavors too.
• Protein Bar - crumble up half of your favorite flavor of protein bar.
• Chocolate Chips - Toss in a couple tablespoons of dark chocolate chips.
• Nut Butter - Add a scoop of your favorite natural nut butters.
• Nuts - Add some crunch with chopped walnuts, pecans, almonds, or peanuts.
• Ice Cream - Use your favorite high protein/low sugar ice cream and scoop it on while the cake is still warm - yum!
• Whipped Cream - A squirt of fresh, lightly sweetened whipped cream is the perfect finish.

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