In this travel edition of Mad Genius Trips, star chef Kristen Kish shares her ultimate easy recipe: chocolate mug cake.

I'm Justin Chapel from Food & Wine's test kitchen and I'm at the Food & Wine classic in Aspen hitting up my favorite chefs for their mad genius tips. That is mad genius. I am here with my friend Top Chef, Kristen Kish and she is an ice cream super fan. Kristen, I have to ask. Do you have an imaginative use for ice cream? I do. If you take a half-eaten pint of ice cream, add a couple of ingredients, throw it in the microwave, and you have instant cake. That is mad genius. I can't wait to get back to the kitchen and check it out for myself. I love Kristen's idea for almost instant cake so much. And I'm so excited to show you how genius it is. So what I'm starting with is about a half a pint of chocolate ice cream because I love chocolate. I would say it's about three quarters of a cup and what I'm gonna do is add about a third of a cup of cake flour a half a teaspoon of baking powder I'm just gonna take a cute little whisk, mix it up, and I have this perfectly smooth cake batter. And what I wanna do is put it into a microwave safe mug, pour it right in there, and now for the fun part. We're gonna pop it in the microwave for about two minutes. We're gonna check it every 30 seconds until it's puffed and beautiful. [MUSIC] Just keep an eye on the cake, you'll see them it will slowly start to rise and when it gets to the top of the mug you wanna put it out. I'm watching my cake. You see that it puffed up a little bit, and then it settled nice and gently, and because I love a little powdered sugar I'm gonna top it with a little of that, and now the best part. I get to dig in. [MUSIC] Fluffy. [MUSIC] It's so good. It's always like molten chocolate cake. And it's so fun and it's mad genius. [BLANK_AUDIO]