You know what we love? 3 ingredient recipes.
Sometimes 5 ingredient recipes, if we’re feeling fancy!
Those times when you’re craving homemade sweetness, but don’t have the 20 ingredients or the time or the patience to bake something elaborate are difficult, to say the least.
Whether it’s because it’s midnight and you just need some chocolate, or you promised to make something for an event but you forgot and the event is in thirty minutes, easy to prepare recipes are a lifesaver.
All the recipes featured here require five ingredients or less, and they’re all common ingredients you likely have in your pantry or fridge.
They’re also very flexible recipes, so you can easily modify an ingredient in many of them.
Contents
5-Ingredient Recipe
Apple Cinnamon Pancakes
- Dry pancake mix
- Apples
- Cinnamon
- Milk
- Eggs
This is the most complicated recipe on this list, and it’s still pretty simple to make.
Use pancake mix for quickness and ease, but if you really want to make pancake batter from scratch, go for it. Either way, you end up with delicious pancake-coated apple slices, reminiscent of apple pie but without the hassle of making a crust and having to buy fifteen separate ingredients.
Here’s the method:
- Core and slice apples
- Sprinkle with cinnamon
- Make pancake batter from instant pancake mix, milk, and eggs (follow instructions on box of pancake mix)
- Mix more cinnamon in with instant pancake mix
- Dip apples in pancake batter
- Fry like a pancake
- Stack them all up on a plate, add syrup and whipped cream if you’d like, and devour
This recipe is excellent for post-breakup brunches and for fueling the despair of studying for finals at midnight.
4-Ingredient Recipe
- Box of cake mix
- Vegetable oil
- Eggs
- Mix-ins (up to you!)
You can use any cake mix you’d like.
You can use chocolate cake mix and mix in peanut butter chips. Red velvet cake and white chocolate chips makes a delicious cookie. Dried fruit is a great mix in for white cake. Add sprinkles to white cake and you have birthday cake cookies! You can drizzle caramel or melted Nutella over finished chocolate cake cookies.
The possibilities are absolutely endless!
A good rule of thumb is to use two eggs and a third of a cup of vegetable oil per box of cake mix, but you can use more oil if you feel like your dough is too dry.
Cake mixes very pretty significantly from brand to brand so experiment.
This recipe is ideal for events that you’re committed to, but only remembered about the event the morning of.
Five minutes of prep, 15 minutes of oven time, and you can run out the door with a tray of homemade cookies.
3-Ingredient Recipe
- Peanut butter
- Sugar
- Egg
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Drop balls (or lumps, up to you) of dough onto a baking sheet.
Flatten them down if you want.
Stick the baking sheet in the oven for about 10 minutes. And voila, cookies!
They’re good for any occasion – just eat them all.
2-Ingredient Recipe
Soufflé
- Nutella
- Eggs
Yes, you can make a soufflé with two ingredients!
Here we go. Separate the eggs into separate bowls. Mix the egg yolks in with the Nutella. Whip the egg whites until stiff. Fold them into the Nutella-egg yolk mixture slowly (add about a third of it at a time).
Pour the mixture into an oven-safe container (ideally a ramekin or an oven-safe mug) and bake for fifteen minutes.
Add-ins are of course always an option. Whipped cream is a classic chocolate soufflé topping for a reason. You can freeze the soufflé and eat it with ice cream.
Melt some caramel candy and drizzle it over the top for a chocolate-caramel concoction.
This is perfect for a romantic dinner in, or just a night spent cuddling on the couch. And with only two ingredients, you really can’t go wrong.
Bonus Recipe!
This is for those days when you’re still in your pajamas at 3pm in the afternoon, it’s storming outside, and you still have deadlines to meet. It’s a recipe for one-ingredient sundae sauce.
1-Ingredient Sundae Sauce
- Any spread, frankly
You can use any spread you want; peanut butter, hazelnut spreads, cookie butters, jams, chocolate-caramel candies, whatever you want.
Just put as much as you want in a mug, microwave it for 45 seconds to a minute and thirty seconds, and either drizzle it over your ice cream or just scoop your ice cream straight into the mug.
Perfection.
Speculoos cookie butter on chocolate ice cream is especially good, but mango jam with strawberry ice cream is also pretty delicious.
This works even better when you have a near empty jar of whatever spread you’re using. Microwave the jar for a little bit, scoop your ice cream into the jar, and enjoy heaven.
What are your favorite 3 ingredient recipes?