It takes just a few minutes' time and a scarcely three-quarter-cup scoop of flour to bake a half-dozen mid-sized chocolate cupcakes. Of course, it helps immeasurably if you add a quarter-cup cocoa, use cake and pastry flour, a dash of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, and process these dry ingredients through a sifter to ensure there are no lumps of flour.

And while you're at it, prepare an egg and about a third cup of milk, and a teaspoon of vanilla. Oops, a third cup of Becel margarine fluffed into a half-cup of granulated sugar. There you are, the constituents of a half-dozen chocolate cupcakes. Good thing it comes automatically to me now: the ingredients, the measurements, the procedure, dredged out of years of experience and baking, to enable me to put them together without much thought.

Of course it helps that I've got a lovely little counter-top convection oven, which accomplishes the baking task in record time, producing a light, moist and exceedingly good-tasting end-product. And then the icing, comprised of Becel margarine, icing sugar, vanilla, smoothed over the cooled cupcakes, sprinkled lightly with chocolate bits; voila! complete.

And it's always pleasurable to hear my husband's comments about how good the house smells, redolent of chocolate being baked, and his enthusiasm for capping off a Friday night dinner with a baked dessert. Different from the rest of the week when dessert comes in the form of fresh fruit.

He is excused on these occasions for having consumed two and a half of the cupcakes.