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Composite Image by Michelle A. Hoyle based on Lin Pernille Photography’s attribution licensedphoto and Amarand Agasi’s attribution-noncommercial-sharealike licensed photo.
Image: Chocolate pudding with a candy cane.

I was inspired to try this out by following the trail of a LifeHacker blog post on making macaroni and cheese in a coffee mug to The Family Kitchen blog. My eye was caught by a side panel link to "Microwave Chocolate Peppermint Pudding in 5 Minutes!. I did store the URL away but then when I went to make it, I couldn’t be bothered to check my stash and came up with “Chocolate-Peppermint Pudding” at the FatFree Vegan Kitchen. My final recipe was an adaptation of the latter and took more than 5 minutes, but not much longer. The result is something that tastes an awful lot like After Eight mints! Note that this is gluten-free and can be vegan.

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I was over for dinner Misetak’s yesterday and the subject of five-spice powder came up. She’d gone to the local store and examined a bottle of Schwartz’s Five-Spice Powder. She quickly put it back on the shelf when she noticed the first ingredient was salt. In our combined, admittedly inexpert, opinion, salt is not one of the classic five spices of five spice powder. We tried to name them off and came up with star anise, cloves, coriander seeds, pepper, and she thought perhaps mace/nutmeg. I knew I had a recipe to make Chinese five-spice powder by hand, so I promised to look it up and share.

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