Boston, MA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 10/15/2009 -- There was a time when lucky kids would come home from school to find their mothers taking freshly-baked cookies out of the oven. Those mothers are working now, and they're just too tired afterwards to get all of their baking gear together, take cookie sheets in and out of the oven, and then clean up a mess in the kitchen. They're also watching calories, and they don't want dozens of baked goods lying around for days at a time to tempt them into eating way more than they should.

But just because moms aren't baking very many cookies these days that doesn't mean kids have to give up on after-school snacks (or spend their pocket money buying those snacks at the supermarket or doughnut shop). It just means that parents have to be a bit more creative to come up with easy and quick to prepare treats -- or in teaching their kids to create snacks for themselves.

Microwave mug cakes, therefore, are poised to replace cookies as the favored quick snack for kids and their parents. With a few simple ingredients, a microwave-safe mug and dish, and a potholder, kids and parents can create single-serving snacks to suit every mood and every taste in ten minutes or less.

"You can finish a microwave mug cake in one sitting. There won't be any leftovers to nibble at all week long. With a microwave mug cake, you bake it, and you eat it, and that's that. Cleanup takes only about 60 seconds, if you're seriously dawdling," promises Stacey Miller, author of "101 Recipes for Microwave Mug Cakes: Single-Serving Snacks in Less Than 10 Minutes" (BPT Press, October 2009).

"101 Recipes for Microwave Mug Cakes" builds on an ingenious recipe for a chocolate mug cake that Stacey, who is a book publicist by day, saw -- over and over again -- on the Internet. "Every time I turned around, someone I knew was emailing me the recipe for this particular snack. Apparently, the recipe had 'gone viral.' Then, one day, an old college buddy posted a link to the recipe on his Facebook page, and that pushed me over the edge. I had to try it, then and there ... and I loved it!"

Stacey hoped to find additional mug cake recipes online, but for once, Google came up dry. The chocolate mug cake seemed to be the beginning and end of the online mug cake offerings. Stacey found that unacceptable, so in her spare time, she set about transforming all of her favorite cake and muffin recipes -- including blueberry muffins, carrot cake, cheesecake, and applesauce cake -- into microwave mug cake recipes. "At first, I wasn't sure that I could do it," Stacey admits. "Then I thought about how many mug cake fans were counting on me, and I knew I had to do it."

So, now that Stacey has 101 microwave mug cake recipes, does that mean she sits around all day long and eats them? "No, I actually find that one microwave mug cake goes a long way. If I indulge my sweet tooth a couple of times a month, that's a lot for me. That's what I liked so much about the mug cake concept initially: you end with only one portion, and no diet is so rigid that it doesn't let you indulge in a single snack once in awhile. You don't have to feel guilty for indulging yourself in a microwave mug cake. You only have to feel bad about denying yourself the pleasure of a treat -- and then eating an entire box of doughnuts, or the whole frozen dessert. Microwave mug cakes provide built-in damage control. They let you keep it simple, and they let you enjoy yourself. How can you beat that?"

101 Recipes for Microwave Mug Cakes:
Single-Serving Snacks in Less Than 10 Minutes
By Stacey J. Miller
BPT Press
October 2009
978-0-9842285-0-8
http://www.microwavemugcakes.com