Reduce Waste with Recipes – One-Pan Chocolate Cake

Looking for an easy way to reduce waste in the kitchen? This cooking tip may be so obvious we often overlook it: only use one dish. Sometimes limiting yourself to one dish—especially if you’re cooking something complicated with a lot of ingredients—may be out of the question, but trying to reduce the amount of dishes you need to wash will save water and energy when it comes time to do the dishes.

So this month we offer you a dessert recipe that does only use one pan (and not even a mixing bowl!). This quick-to-make chocolate cake can be mixed right in the pan you bake it in. How simple is that?

One-Pan Chocolate Cake

Photo: Flickr/Lisa Brewster

Ingredients 

1½ cups unbleached, all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar

¼ cup cocoa

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon espresso powder (optional)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 tablespoon vinegar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 cup cold water or milk

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Meanwhile, measure all the dry ingredients into your pan. An 8 or 9-inch square or round pan that’s at least two inches tall will work best. Use a whisk or fork to mix the ingredients together, level out the ingredients and make three holes in the mixture. Pour vanilla into the first hole, vinegar into the second and vegetable oil into the third. Then pour the cold water or milk over the whole pan and stir everything together until it’s mixed well.

Bake the cake for 30 to 35 minutes. When it has cooled, you can save even more dishes by eating it right out of the pan.

Dishwashing Tip: When you have accumulated a bunch of dirty dishes, use the dishwasher to clean them (if you have one). Running a full dishwasher actually uses less water and energy than washing dishes by hand.

Knit with Plastic

Knitters have come up with some pretty brilliant ideas for making yarn. T-Shirt yarn, for example, is one popular homemade alternative to store-bought yarn. One of our favorite unique yarn projects is making yarn from plastic bags. You can use any kind of plastic bag for this project, though the thin kind used at grocery stores works best.

To make the yarn, you’ll need to roll the bag into a long tube, cut it into strips, and then tie the strips together. (There are many YouTube videos and photo tutorials that can walk you through these steps. Check out this one from Instructables or this one from Etsy.)  Once you have a significant amount of yarn, you can use it to knit (or crochet) whatever you like.

In our experience, plastic yarn can be made into an effective grocery or tote bag, which is great for shopping or a trip to the farmers market. We received the bag pictured below as a gift, and whenever we use it, it gets a lot of attention. It’s functional, has a unique texture and keeps plastic bags from going to waste.