Chapter 5: Chocolate Madness

After my rather boring, but enlightening stint with gluten-free cookies, I have ventured over to cake town. My plan for this section is to start with high-fat, which are typically denser cakes like devil's food or yellow cake. Then I will be moving on to low-fat cakes, which are your angel food or chiffon cakes. For now I am making small sample cakes for tasting to finish the blog, but the other sizes might make appearances in future blogs, or my family will eat them. But moving on, this time I also got to make my own blend of gluten-free cake flour. I found the ratio on http://www.food.com/recipe/i-cant-believe-its-not-gluten-gluten-free-cake-flour-mix-189120#activity-feed, that uses brown rice flour, potato starch, tapioca flour and xanthan gum, to create a lighter flour for more delicate items. I decided the perfect cake to start with is my favorite classic chocolate cake, because who doesn’t like chocolate?!?

(Gluten-free batter)

The mixer is out, my ingredients are lined up and ready to go! First with a high fat cake like this you do the standard creaming of the butter and sugar until it is light colored and fluffy. Eggs were next and then I alternated between my liquids and drys. Now in the beginning stages of mixing any high fat cake, you can beat the heck out of the fat but once the gluten is added you have to be careful not to over beat because you will get a beyond dense, gummy and tunneled cake. Obviously, since I was using a gluten-free flour, I had lest to worry about. When examining the batter I noticed, like everything I have made thus far, was gritty. But even more so in the chocolate cake batter because it was very liquid like. In this it looked more like small lumps than a slightly sandy texture. Nonetheless, in the oven it went, and I awaited my results.

(Regular batter)

Both types of cake baked close to twenty-five minutes, and my cake tester came out clean. With a closer look at the now cooled down cakes, the gluten free one felt overly sticky, like in the sense that it wasn’t fully baked even though it had a nice dome to it. Then when tasting it, it had a starchy after taste and was crumbly, melt in your mouth softness. Besides the crumbling, everything else about the structure seamed solid. The strangest revelation from this though, was the gluten-free cake didn’t have a strong chocolate presence on your taste buds.

(Regular on the left, gluten-free on the right)

Overall this was a successful first cake, the next high fat cake I make, I’m going to bake it for longer than the regular one to see if that helps with the starches. Hopefully I find the happy medium where it doesn’t dry it out. So tune in two weeks from now to see my take on the yellow cake demon!