A wonderful little kitchen gift!

Oh, my, do I have a great kitchen gift idea for you!  This Hot Chocolate Mug Cake from Denise at RefreshHer is one of the best things I have tasted in a long time.  And it was SO easy!

I did leave out the nuts and the cinnamon, because I prefer my chocolate unadulterated.  I also assembled my ingredients a little bit differently than Denise did.  She just put them all in the mug and stirred them up, but I decided to sift the dry ingredients together and put them into a zip-top sandwich bag along with the chocolate chips.  I sifted them onto waxed paper and could easily roll the waxed paper up a bit to transfer the mix to the sandwich bag.

Since I was out of miniature marshmallows, and probably would have wanted fresh ones for this recipe anyway, I picked some up at Wal*mart.  I was so surprised to find this tiny bag of Campfire marshmallows which will fit right in the top of the mug.  It was 39¢ and so cute, I just had to use it.  The bag is about 3 inches by 4 1/2 inches and contains one ounce of marshmallows.  I think it would likely contain enough marshmallows for two mug cakes. 

My directions were going to vary a bit from the download Denise linked to (since I left out two ingredients), so I made up my own tag to use with the mix.  I just tucked the tag into the mug with the packets of mix and marshmallows.

I had some sweet "Winter Wonderland" paper bags and used one of them to package the mug in.  I folded the top down, punched two holes and threaded some baker's twine through to tie the bag shut.  Then I added a homemade gift tag from one of 2015's Christmas cards!

 Mr. T and I tried out the mug cake recipe last night and shared the cake.   It was absolutely delicious and so easy to make.  Our mug that we used was rather tall, so we used iced tea spoons to eat the cake.

Christmas mugs would be fun to use for this, also!

I can think of many, many people who would enjoy a gift like this: teens, college students, singles, busy moms and dads, older folks who no longer bake ... the list could go on and on.  Have fun with this idea!  And if you were inspired by the post or if you make a mug cake, leave Denise a comment and tell her so!