Quest for a Gluten Free Cake Recipe - Round 1

I needed to test some gluten free cake recipes since I am making a wedding cake for Meghan's co-worker. Why gluten free cake you ask? The bride to be has been having a series of food allergies and her doctor suspects it is to gluten. So, this brings a challenge, but something I am willing to explore so that the couple and their guests can all enjoy the wedding cake.

I have been bouncing around with making the top tier gluten free, or the entire cake and cupcakes. Either way, whatever they smash into each others faces needs to be gluten free.

So, I rounded up four recipes I scoured the Internet over - based on reviews.

Recipe # 1: Modified recipe using Bob's Red Mill vanilla cake mix as a base:

The result was not what I was hoping for. As suspected, the cake taste was OK - but you could tell it was used with rice flour. The texture was was spongy but slightly chewy and not much crumb.

Recipe # 2: Vanilla pound cake using garbanzo flour:

I chose this pound cake recipe because the pictures displayed a moist cake with a nice crumb.While the cake did in fact have the texture I wanted, I could definitely tell this was made from beans. There was no amount of vanilla that could escape this "beany" flavor.

Recipe #3: Modified Betty Crocker GF Vanilla Cake Mix recipe:

I was reluctant to try a modified cake box mix again, but this one had lots of pictures and great reviews. Betty Crocker makes a line of gluten free cake mixes. I was skeptical that this would be any good because, cake mixes usually have all kinds of preservatives in it. To my surprise, the vanilla cake mix ingredients are: Rice flour, sugar, potato starch, leavening (which baking soda and baking powder), xanthum gum, and salt. That's it! This is pretty much a standard GF flour blend - so I decided to go forward with this one.

This recipe doctors up the mix by adding extra egg and egg white, orange juice, vanilla (I used bourbon vanilla extract - amazing!), and vanilla pudding mix.

The result was a tasty cake that was moist and had a nice crumb - very close to a wheat flour cake recipe. The orange juice was not detectable (which was a concern) by my taste tester. Whoo hoo! I could definitely work with this one... perhaps even use this recipe as a template and re-create it from scratch. But! I have one more recipe to test ....

Recipe #4: Vegan and Gluten free recipe using coconut flour as a base:

As I expected, this recipe tasted OK - but coconut flour usually comes out with a grainy texture. You can prevent this by processing your flours to super fine texture and sifting before mixing to bake. Some people also pre-soak their flours.

I did not do either or these extra steps, because the recipe and reviews made it seem like this would work without it. The results were not bad, but not what I was looking for. It was moist, but with very little crumb. I worry that this would become extremely dense when sitting in a fridge and thawing out, since coconut flour tends to absorb lots of moisture.

The winner in this round was Recipe #3, which can be found here. The texture and taste were pretty close to wheat flour recipes - and I have some other ideas to tweak this recipe, so this will be my next baking project. But at last! I have found a base I can work with - it only. took. 7 hours.

What I learned:

• Don't plan a day of baking without eating breakfast first. By noon and stomach was hurting from sampling batter and cake. My inner child was quite happy, though.
• Gluten Free baking is not an easy task - thanks to all of those GF bloggers out there that helped me out on this one. The information is plentiful and there is lots of room for creativity as there are so many gluten free flour options and ingredients to use. 
• Be more scrutinizing when I read reviews. It probably is something good to note if the reviewer actually remembers what wheat flour cake tastes like. They could rave over how delicious a GF cake is, but probably has not had wheat flour cake in over a decade. Yikes. 
• Tests, practicing, and trial and error are all necessary. I got into some frustration over this round, but I did broaden my abilities in baking. 
• I have a lot of GF flours left over - I don't know what to do with them yet.
• Guar gum is cheaper and a substitute for Xanthum gum. 
• Make sure you remember to use a paddle attachment when making butter cream - or else you end up with air bubbles when you are piping/icing. Oops.

Meghan taste tested the cupcakes and gave a thumbs up - so I filled, iced, and packaged a mini cake and cupcakes for the wedding couple to sample. Hope they like it!

Gluten free marble cake with Bavarian cream and chocolate ganache filling, vanilla buttercream, and white chocolate seashells

**Update**

The couple liked the samples and decided to make the top tier with GF cake along with a few cupcakes for the wedding. A Gluten Free Win! I can say for sure that I will be using this recipe as a base from now on!