This recipe I came up with on the fly, out of the blue, in order to have something quick and easy for dessert.  I looked around at other recipes but I can’t find anything really that it is like.  As you may have noticed I really love baking cakes and that’s what I mostly do when I want to bake.  The problem with cakes is how long most of them can take to make.  These brownies were easy to make and quite good.  They have more of a cakey texture and the peanut butter is a wonderful combination.  The honey adds extra sweetness and a moist texture.  I usually prefer fudgy brownies but these turned out well.

The grocery store has been out of arrowroot starch for a few weeks now.  Either they won’t restock it or they have moved its location and I can’t find it.  I didn’t want to go back to using cornflour (corn starch) or potato starch, so I decided to see if coconut flour could replace it.  It seems to work just fine.  Because it absorbs so much moisture it acts in many ways similar to a starch.  If you can’t get or would rather not use coconut flour, then arrowroot starch, cornflour (cornstarch), or potato starch would work instead.  In case you were wondering, it did not impart the taste of coconut.  If you used something in place of the coconut flour, then the flours are easy to find.

Peanut Butter Honey Brownies

80 ml (1/3 cup) oil

225g (1 cup) caster sugar

3 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

60g (1/2 cup) cocoa

110g (1 cup) gluten-free flour blend (I used white rice flour, tapioca flour, and coconut flour)

80 ml (1/3 cup) water

3 tablespoons peanut butter

2 tablespoons honey, golden syrup, maple syrup, or agave syrup

Preheat oven to 350F.  Grease a 23 cm (9 inch) square tin.  In a bowl, mix together oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.  Add salt, cocoa, gluten-free flour blend, and water.  Mix until smooth.  Pour half the batter into prepared tin.  Put dollops of peanut butter on the batter.  Drizzle the honey or preferred syrup over the batter.  Pour the other half of the batter over the top and spread gently to cover the peanut butter layer.  Bake for 25 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.  Cool on a cooling rack.  Makes 9-16 brownies, depending on how small you cut them.  Enjoy!

Woohoo! A cake made with beer! I’m not a big fan of beer, but Brian is. I’m the chocolate cake fan. This cake looked quite toothsome and I really wanted to see if the beer gave it a unique taste. I came across it on The Village Green. Thanks Celia for sharing this recipe. This is the third of Nigella’s recipe I have tried and I have been happy with 2/3 of them. Not bad at all.

There aren’t many gluten-free beers currently available, especially darker ones, as Guiness is. Redbridge is all I’ve ever been able to find. If you are lucky enough to live somewhere that makes darker gluten-free beers or you feel like ordering some, then I’d use that over Redbridge, which is a lighter beer. Thusly, the finished cake will not likely have the same quality as the Guiness cake, but it is fun to make a different sort of chocolate cake. If you’d rather not use any beer or alcohol, you could certainly substitute water, coffee, or even root beer.

This cake is extremely dark and moist, as the original is claimed to be, which is good. I love the dark contrast of the cake with the icing. The resemblance of the finished cake to a foaming pint is lovely. This is the crumbliest cake I’ve made in a while, so if crumbs bother you you could add some xanthan gum, 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon. It’s really nice that you can make the whole thing in one pot, well except the icing, but who needs that, right ;)? There is a sort of taste of grains in this cake, coming from the beer, that is different from other chocolate cakes. Mostly it reminds me of a devil’s food cake. It is rich and chocolatey and definitely does not taste of beer, if you’re worried about that. All the alcohol will cook out of the cake when it is baked. Enjoy!

Redbridge Chocolate Cake

250 ml (1 cup) Redbridge beer (this is not a whole bottle, so swig the rest or hand off to someone to do so )

250g butter (1 cup)

75g (rounded 1/2 cup) cocoa

400g (2 cups) caster sugar

140 ml (about 1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon) sour cream

2 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

275g (2 1/4 cups) gluten-free flour blend (I used white sorghum flour, tapioca flour, and arrowroot starch)

2 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

Icing

300g (10 oz) cream cheese (you could even use 2/3rds of this and be fine)

150g (1 cup) icing sugar

125 ml (1/2 cup) cream (you could cut this in half if you wanted)

Preheat oven to 180C (350F). Grease and line a 23 cm (9 inch) springform tin or two 23 cm (9 inch) round cake tins.

Add Redbridge to a large saucepan. Slice up the butter and add to the beer. Slicing it up will allow it to melt much more quickly. After the butter is melted, remove the saucepan from the heat. Add the cocoa and sugar, beat until well combined. Add the sour cream, eggs, and vanilla, and beat well together. Last, beat in the gluten-free flour blend, bicarbonate of soda, and xanthan gum if you choose to use any. Cake batter will be extremely thin and runny.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin or tins. Bake for 25-35 minutes for two tins or 45 minutes to an hour for one or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Cool completely before removing from the tin(s). If you have two cakes, it’s your choice, put one on top of the other or serve each separately with half the icing.

Beat the cream cheese and icing sugar together. Add cream and beat until smooth and spreadable. Plop the icing on top of the cooled cake and spread it around until it looks like the frothy top of a pint of beer. Enjoy!

Another winner from Cookie Madness. I had some bananas I wanted to use so I decided this would be an interesting recipe to try. They are very fruity and have a soft texture that is not crumbly from all the fruit in them. I used dried reconstituted cherries to use up some dried cherries I had instead of maraschino cherries.

The taste is slightly reminiscent of banana tea bread. Thanks Anna for sharing this recipe. Easy to adapt to vegan, just replace the egg with applesauce, apple butter, prune puree, or flax seeds and water. I usually use the flax seeds if I want to use an egg substitute, since that’s what I have around. Use whatever you prefer. If you use applesauce, apple butter, or prune puree it will add to the fruitiness. For the cream cheese icing, you could use a vegan cream cheese spread.

I left the nuts out of the bars and they still tasted good. The icing was fine without the milk added to it. The dried cherries were good and definitely had cherry flavour, but probably wouldn’t have the sweetness like the maraschinos, which would definitely be more like a banana split. Still, these bars were good. They have solid banana flavour. Put some ice cream on top and there you have it: banana split ;). Enjoy!

Banana Split Bars

220g (2 cups) gluten-free flour blend (I used white sorghum flour, white rice flour, and tapioca flour)

3/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2 overripe bananas, mashed

225g (1 cup) caster sugar

2 eggs or 13g (2 tablespoons) ground flax seed and 90 ml (6 tablespoons) water

120 ml (1/2 cup) vegetable oil

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

50g (1/4 cup, 2 oz) dried cherries, reconstituted in equivalent volume of liquid

Icing:

55g (4 tablespoons) butter or trans-fat free shortening

85g (3 oz) cream cheese or vegan cream cheese spread

110g (1 cup) icing sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 175C (350F). Line a 23 x 33 cm (9×13 in) tin with parchment paper. Blend flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt, and cinnamon together. In a separate bowl, add bananas, sugar, eggs, oil, and vanilla and mix until well combined. Mix in reserved dry ingredients. Add pineapple and cherries and stir it all together. Pour batter into the tin and spread evenly.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Let cool. Prepare icing by beating butter and cream cheese or shortening and vegan cream cheese spread together. Add icing sugar and beat until smooth. Add vanilla and beat until combined. Spread the completed icing on the cooled bars and garnish with extra cherries.

Casein-Free Option:

The bars are casein-free. For the icing, you could leave it off; the bars have plenty of flavour and texture without. In that case you could still garnish them with extra cherries. Or you can substitute trans-fat free shortening for the butter and a vegan cream cheese spread for the cream cheese.

This cake was made in honour of my eldest son’s fourth birthday. Unlike his older sister, he hadn’t been talking on end about what he wanted his birthday cake to look like. A few days before his birthday, I asked him what he wanted it to be. He said he wanted “green icing.” (He’s been admiring the Incredible Hulk recently. I really hoped his next request wasn’t going to be a cake shaped like the Incredible Hulk.) “Anything else?” I asked, “what would you like in the cake?” “I want a strawberry cake,” he said. I didn’t know at first how I was going to tackle it. I’ve never made a strawberry cake before, at least not one that didn’t come from a mix, only cake with strawberries, but my mother-in-law managed to make a blue cake for him, blue icing and all, with blueberries, for his third birthday, so I thought I could manage to make a strawberry one.

The green icing was a challenge. I didn’t know what to use for colouring, since I wanted to use something natural. After racking my brains, I remembered I had some liquid chlorophyll in the fridge. If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s a concentrated liquid supplement made from plants, mostly alfalfa. If you use it, make sure the brand you use is gluten-free and has no extra additives. If you can’t get liquid chlorophyll or don’t want to buy a whole bottle just to make green icing then I suppose you could drain some frozen spinach and use the juice or use a store-bought colour paste, whatever you prefer. In case you were wondering with the chlorophyll, it tastes like sweet fresh greens on its own, but none of this gets transferred to the icing. The icing wasn’t really a bright green, more like a light pastel spring green. It was green enough to make my son happy though.

I found the cake and icing recipes on Foodaphilia. Thanks E for sharing such nice recipes. I mashed up some strawberries and added them to the cake itself. I made a vanilla mousse, using Ghirardhelli’s recipe for chocolate mousse, adding two extra egg yolks to it (so I wouldn’t have to find a way to use them up or throw them away), leaving out the chocolate and adding vanilla extract. For the icing, I left out the peanut butter and added lemon juice and lemon extract. Brian had suggested mint, but that didn’t win me over. I knew strawberry and mint could be good together but I wasn’t entirely convinced. To assemble the cake, I put one layer down, then spread strawberry jam on it, added cut up fresh strawberries, then vanilla mousse, then the top layer, the icing, and whole fresh strawberries.

There was plenty of strawberry in that cake. The lemon in the icing paired well with the strawberries, but it would have been just as good with vanilla extract instead. The cake ended up with sort of a custardy texture which could have been the use of tapioca flour, but could have been my getting distracted, not noting that the recipe said to alternate the wet and dry ingredients, and adding all the wet first, then the dry. The cake probably missed out on some aeration that it would have gotten otherwise. The vanilla mousse was a nice accompaniment. The recipe makes 2-3 times what you need, so you’ll have leftovers or could cut the batch. I suppose if you wanted to skip the icing, you could use the extra mousse on top of the cake instead. The creaminess of the mousse goes so well with the strawberries. Enjoy!

Very Strawberry Cake

Cake:

170g (3/4 cup) butter

340g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar

220g (2 cups) gluten-free flour blend (I used white rice flour, tapioca flour, and arrowroot starch)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 large egg whites

177 ml (3/4) cup milk

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

about 10 strawberries (100g) , mashed

Preheat oven to 175C(350F). Grease two 20cm (9 inch) round cake tins. Cream butter and sugar together until light in texture. In a separate bowl, mix together gluten-free flour blend, baking powder, and salt. In a cup or another bowl, mix together egg white, milk, and vanilla extract.

Add 1/3 of the flour mix to the creamed butter and sugar, then half the milk mixture, 1/3 of the flour mix, the other half of the milk mixture, then the last of the flour mix. Add the mashed strawberries and fold them in.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake tins and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until skewer inserted comes out clean. Cool in tins, on rack for five minutes, then flip cakes gently out onto rack and let them cool completely.

Vanilla Mousse:

6 large egg yolks

115g (1/2 cup) caster sugar

475 ml (2 cups) cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

In a small bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, beat yolks on high until they are thick in texture and pale yellow in colour. Add sugar and beat until well incorporated and mixture thickens up. Heat half the cream in a saucepan until just hot, not boiling.

Pour half the hot cream into the egg yolk mixture and stir, the pour the mixture back into the saucepan with the hot cream. Over low heat, cook about five minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens up and comes together.

Add vanilla extract. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours or until chilled. Beat the other half of the cream until stiff and fold it into the chilled vanilla mixture. Refrigerate until needed.

Green Icing:

225g (1 cup) butter, softened

220g (2 cups) icing sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice (optional)

2 teaspoons lemon extract (may substitute with vanilla extract)

1 tablespoon liquid chlorophyll

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat butter until smooth. Add powdered sugar slowly and beat until smooth. Add lemon juice, lemon extract, and liquid chlorophyll and mix until combined and colour is even.

Filling:

about 10 strawberries (100 g), cut into small pieces

140g (5 oz) strawberry jam

Garnish:

about 10 strawberries (100g), with stems left on

Assembly:

Place bottom layer on a plate or cake pedestal. Spread with strawberry jam. Arrange cut up strawberries evenly over the jam. Put dollops of 1/3rd to half the vanilla mousse on top of the strawberries and jam. Place the top layer gently on top of the mousse. Some may ooze out the sides. I think it’s decorative and pretty if you can see some of it. To cut down on the ooze factor, if that bothers you, you can refrigerate the mousse until well chilled before using (or make it the day before) and/or use less mousse.

Spread the green icing over the top layer, just on the top. Even if you spread it thickly, you’ll have leftovers. Since you’re not icing the sides of the cake, you could cut the icing recipe in half if you wanted. Arrange whole strawberries on top of the icing and add candles, if needed. Enjoy!

Here is another good recipe from Anna at Cookie Madness. Just the name alone is amusing enough for me to want to bake them. When my kids tried to pronounce the name it came out as “Chooga Chew-Chews” at first, then shortened up to just “Chew-Chews”. These are tasty bars and to me tasted like a cross between Millionaire’s Shortbread and a Skor bar. The caramel filling here is more toffee like than Millionaire’s, which is a smoother caramel.

To try something different, I put chocolate chips on half the bars and 80% dark chocolate on the other. The dark chocolate was definitely richer and did taste good, but in the end I think I prefer the chocolate chips, as there is a better balance of chocolate and toffee and the chocolate chips did not overwhelm the toffee as much as the dark chocolate did. I wonder what a caramel chocolate bar on top would be like? Delicious I’d expect, hopefully not too gut-bustingly rich.

I found myself without arrowroot starch for this recipe, so I had to come up with a substitute. I don’t think I’ve ever tried a gluten-free flour blend before, premixed or one I’ve blended myself, that didn’t have a starch in it, so I was curious to see how the recipe held together. I used tapioca flour, buckwheat flour, and white sorghum flour. It worked, but I found it a bit crumbly, more so than other shortbreads I’ve made. Those didn’t have pecans either though, which could possibly have contributed to the crumbliness.

The first pic above, is of the bars just out of the oven, with the chocolate melted but not spread over the top yet. You can see the toffee peeking out, which doesn’t really show up as well in the other two pics. All in all, these are good.  They are rich and toasting the pecans brings out a good amount of nuttiness. If you have a nut allergy, though, I’m sure they would be just as tasty without the pecans.  Thanks Anna for sharing the recipe.  Enjoy!

(Semisweet chocolate on the left, 80% dark on the right)

(Dark chocolate on the left this time. Are those two waltzing? )

This recipe for Tres Leches Cake is from The Food Network. I saw Alton Brown’s episode on Tres Leches Cake and went looking for his recipe first. When I couldn’t find it right away, I stopped to look at the other recipes and decided on a different one with more eggs and less flour. This one is from Alex Garcia, a restaurateur in New York. I found it relatively simple to make, though difficult to wait for the milk sauce to soak in, and overall tasty. (In the picture of the whole cake below you can see where I had cut it previously after two hours to test the consistency. ) I still want to try Alton’s sometime. His recipes are usually good and most definitely inspiring.

I’ve never made Tres Leches Cake before. It reminded me of a milk pudding. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be so wet, probably not. Even after being in the fridge overnight (12+ hours) there was a layer of milk sauce underneath the whole cake. If this is usual, then this is a very milky dessert that definitely lives up to its name! The cake was light, perhaps a bit too light to stand up to all that milk being poured over it, but it certainly wasn’t heavy. It did hold together, especially on the bottom, so it has a good cohesion and didn’t disintegrate entirely. I replaced the almond extract with vanilla extract, since I didn’t have any almond on hand.

I served it plain, with fruit, or with whipped cream. I liked it better with fruit, though the whipped cream ascended it to a new level of creamy, milky sweetness. Plain wasn’t too bad, but then I preferred it warm instead of chilled. Overall it is a good cake, I’m just not sure I like it as much as other types of cakes. I’m more into bolder flavours, like chocolate (ahem) or cinnamon. Next time I might try it with half as much of the scalded milk to see if it is not so wet and maybe try it with the almond extract or lemon extract.

Tres Leches

6 eggs

225g (1 cup) caster sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

110g (1 cup) gluten-free flour blend (I used white sorghum flour, tapioca flour, and arrowroot starch)

1 397g (14 oz) tin sweetened condensed milk

1 340g (12 oz) tin evaporated milk

475 ml (2 cups) whole milk, scalded

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 175C (350F). Line a 23 x 33 cm (9 x 13 inch) baking dish or tin with parchment paper. Beat eggs, sugar, and salt together until fluffy and tripled in volume. Fold the flour in gently. Pour batter into prepared dish. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until skewer inserted comes out clean. (Mine took about 30 minutes.) Cool on a cooling rack.

Scald the whole milk in a saucepan. Combine sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, scalded whole milk, and vanilla together in a bowl, or better yet, if you have it, one of those big liquid measuring cups.

Poke the cake all over the top with a skewer, chopstick, fork, or toothpick. Pour the milk mixture over the top of the cake. Put it in the fridge for at least two hours to chill to allow the cake to set and the milk sauce to soak into the cake. Keep an eye on it, depending on the consistency of your fridge in keeping temperature, you may need to chill it for longer. The milk sauce should have soaked into the cake so it doesn’t look like it has a layer of milk floating on top. Serve with fruit and/or whipped cream. Serves about 15-18. Enjoy!

(The middle son enjoys a slice.)

This is another recipe inspired by a great one from the Food Network. Their original is from the Retro Desserts cookbook. Peanut butter and bananas is one of my favourite combinations, so I’ve had this recipe on my list for some time now. The cake is baked as a loaf cake, then sliced as if it were a loaf of bread and made into a sandwich with bananas and peanut butter buttercream. Hot fudge sauce and ice cream, if desired, are put on top, making the dish into a sort of hot fudge sundae.

This was my first time using Montina Flour. It is similar to wild rice flour in taste and texture only coarser. When I looked at it and smelt it it reminded me of bits of grass seed and I knew those flecks would appear in the batter after it was baked. Mixing it into a banana cake, since bananas have those flecks too, seemed the perfect way to work with the natural graininess. If you can’t get Montina flour or wild rice flour, then brown rice flour, teff flour, or buckwheat flour would be good as well.

Overall this cake was wonderfully decadent. I liked it with or without ice cream. The banana cake is not as dense as I am accustomed to banana cakes being, which was nice. The only problem I had was not being patient enough with it to let it bake as long as it needed to set all the way through. It needs a long time to bake and I was getting tired of poking it every five minutes to see if the last bit of wetness had congealed, so I pulled it early. I paid for my impatience with the cake falling in the centre just a bit. Since it gets sliced up to serve anyhow, I wasn’t too bothered. Those slices from the centre were shorter in stature and gummier on the top than the others but still tasted delicious.

The nice thing about the versatility of slices is you can use even half of one slice as the top and bottom of the sandwich if you feel like eating less. I suppose you could slice the whole cake in half for one big sandwich if you felt like it :D.

Peanut Butter Banana Sandwiches Cake

280g (2 1/2 cups) gluten-free flour blend (I used montina flour, tapioca flour, and arrowroot starch)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

170g (3/4 cup) butter

280g (1 1/4 cups) caster sugar

3 eggs

3 ripe bananas

100 ml (1/2 cup) sour cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat to 175C (350F). Grease or spray a 21 x 11 cm (8 x 4 inches) loaf tin. Line the bottom with a rectangle of parchment paper. Sift the gluten-free flour blend, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, and salt together into a bowl. Repeat two times for extra airiness. (You could probably just sift once and have the cake be ok, but if you really want to sift in those extra air molecules, then sift away .)

In a separate mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until well combined. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating until each is incorporated. Continue beating until light and fluffy.

In a bowl, mash the bananas until smooth and not lumpy. Stir the sour cream and vanilla into the bananas. Beat 1/3rd of the flour mixture into the creamed butter and sugar. Next, beat in half of the banana mixture, then another 1/3rd of the flour. Beat in the other half of the banana mixture and the last 1/3rd of the flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 60 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. (I recommend going with the skewer test over the time, since this cake is a bit wetter than most. Start checking it after 45 minutes baked, then every five minutes or so until done.) Let the cake cool completely in the tin on a rack.

Accompaniments:

4 bananas

Peanut Butter Buttercream (recipe below)

Chocolate fudge sauce (recipe below)

Ice Cream (optional)

Peanut Butter Buttercream

115g (1/2 cup) butter

225g (1 cup) creamy peanut butter

85g (3/4 cup) icing sugar

Beat the peanut butter and butter together with an electric mixer until smooth. Add the icing sugar and beat on high until icing is fluffy and light.

Chocolate Fudge Sauce

60 ml (1/4 cup) very hot brewed coffee (I used instant)

55g (1/4 cup) caster sugar

60g (1/2 cup) unsweetened cocoa powder

60 ml (1/4 cup, 4 tablespoons) golden syrup

60g (2 oz) semisweet chocolate, chopped

15g (1 tablespoon) butter

Prepare the coffee, then combine it with the sugar and cocoa powder in a medium bowl. Add the golden syrup and stir together until texture is smooth and even. Place the chocolate and butter in a bowl set on top of a pot of simmering water. After the chocolate is completely melted, stir in the syrup-cocoa mixture until smooth. Remove from heat and set aside. Store in a sealed container in the fridge or the freezer.

Assembly:

Turn the cooled cake out of the tin onto a plate or cutting board. With a serrated knife, cut the loaf into slices. (For a smaller serving, slice each of those slices in half again.) Peel the bananas and cut them into thin rounds. To assemble, spread half the cake slices with peanut butter buttercream and layer with banana slices. Top with remaining cake slices to form sandwiches. Put a scoop of ice cream on each sandwich and pour the chocolate fudge sauce over it. Enjoy!

This recipe was inspired by one for a Chocolate Truffle Pound Cake from Diana at Dianas Desserts. I was looking for a way to use the raspberry icing that I botched when making my daughter’s birthday cake. (Which again, I have been keeping in the freezer. I love my freezer. It helps me do my baking projects at my own pace.) Anyhow, a dear friend of mine mentioned soaked sponge cake and I thought that this icing would be wonderful paired with a chocolate sponge cake if it was melted down to a syrup and used to soak the cake.

I made the recipe for the pound cake batter, then split it into three layer tins. The raspberry syrup was then poured as evenly as possible between each layer and drizzled over the top. If you don’t happen to have botched raspberry icing sitting in your freezer to melt down, you can melt all the ingredients together instead to make the syrup that much quicker. I put the cake in the fridge overnight to chill mostly because I ran out of time. It ended up helping the cake set so when I iced it with chocolate icing the next day it wasn’t all soggy. I’m sure it would have been all wonderful and gooey though if I had put the chocolate icing directly on top of the raspberry syrup . I used almonds to garnish it around the edge.

The cake tasted wonderful. The smooth texture of the icing paired with the light texture of the cake was indeed like a chocolate raspberry truffle. Mmmmm. The youngest son couldn’t resist trying to snag a bite.  Thanks Diana for sharing a great recipe.

Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cake

225g (1 cup) butter

600g (3 cups) brown sugar (Yes, that’s a lot of sugar. Yes, this is a big rich cake.)

6 large eggs

280g (2 1/2 cups) gluten-free flour blend (I used quinoa flour, sweet rice flour, and arrowroot starch)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

60g (1/2 cup) cocoa

225 ml (1 cup) buttermilk

175g (6 oz) bittersweet chocolate, melted

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

Raspberry Syrup

75 ml (1/3 cup) raspberry juice

115g (1/2 cup) butter

300g (1 1/2 cups) icing sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Chocolate Truffle Icing

115g (1/2 cup) butter, softened, or trans-fat free shortening

175g (1 1/2 cups) icing sugar

75g (2/3 cup) cocoa

75 ml (5 tablespoons) cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Garnish (optional)

about 24 whole almonds (40g, 1.5 oz, 1/4 cup)

Preheat oven to 165C(325F). Grease three 23 cm (9 inch) layer tins, line with parchment paper, then grease the paper as well. Make sure you have a very large bowl or be prepared to split the batter into batches. Cream the butter with a mixer until smooth. Add the brown sugar a little at a time, breaking up any lumps that may have squeaked by with your fingers. Beat for 5 minutes until well combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each.

In a separate bowl, sift together the gluten-free flour blend, bicarbonate of soda, salt, and cocoa. Add 1/3rd of the dry ingredients to the to the batter, mix until well blended, then add half the buttermilk. Add the next 1/3rd dry ingredients, mix until well blended, then add the other half of the buttermilk. Add the last 1/3rd dry ingredients and mix until well blended. Fold in the melted chocolate by hand and pour into prepared tins.

Bake for about 1 hour and 20-30 minutes or until skewer inserted comes out clean. It’s a long baking time, but the cakes really do need it in order to set up properly.

Let the cakes cool in the tins for about 20-25 minutes, then turn out onto racks and cool completely. Peel off the parchment paper.

Make raspberry syrup by melting all ingredients together in a pot over low to medium low heat, stirring constantly until it forms a smooth, slightly thick syrup, about 5-10 minutes. If you wait too long, you’ll get something more akin to raspberry caramel, which I’m sure would be delicious but not very easy to pour and definitely not well suited to soaking a cake.

Make the chocolate truffle icing by combining all ingredients until light and fluffy, either by hand or with an electric mixer.

To assemble, place the first cake layer on a plate, pour 1/4th of the syrup over it and smooth it around, waiting until it soaks in just a bit. Repeat with the second layer. Place the third layer on top, then pour all of the remaining syrup over the whole cake, allowing it to drizzle down the sides and collect in all the crevices. Put the whole cake in the fridge overnight, in a cake dome, to chill. You could skip this step and go straight to icing it if you don’t mind raspberry syrup oozing out when you put the icing on.

Ice the top of the cake with the chocolate truffle icing. Place whole almonds around the edge. Enjoy!

This recipe was inspired by one for sourdough bread by David Miller at Grow Youthful. I had planned to use Kefir that my husband Brian made. Well, things didn’t go entirely as planned, as is usual so often with baking, especially new recipes. I waited too long to use the Kefir for making bread and it began to ferment, becoming something like airag, which I won’t get into much here, but Brian and I had some on our trip to Mongolia in October 2005. We were hospitably offered airag as guests in the homes of Mongolian herders. It is customary to bring a gift as guests, in thanks for the hospitality, and we offered sweets in return. It was a wonderful experience for us and through the help of our guide/interpretor and driver we got to meet many kind people who let us stay in their homes, visit their land, and eat with their families.

This airag we made was more mainstream, not traditional, being made from cow’s milk. I used the airag in the bread and it had a wonderful yeasty taste, unlike other gluten-free, yeast-free breads I have made, due to the natural yeasts produced through fermentation. The cooking process removes the alcohol and it did not leave a strong taste of alcohol at all, only the pleasant taste of baked bread. The pitfall is having a nice warm spot for the dough to rest long enough undisturbed to raise nicely. This I was not able to provide, despite keeping it covered on the counter and even in a low oven preheated and turned off before the bread was put in over the course of 48 hours. It simply needed more warmth for a longer period of time. As a result my bread was flat, but tasted delicious.

The airag is gone, but we can make more and we have kefir whey saved from the second batch of kefir. I will definitely try this recipe again with the fermented kefir whey, airag, or plain kefir.

Airag Sourdough Bread

220g (2 cups) gluten-free flour blend (quinoa flour, arrowroot starch, sweet rice flour)

250 ml (1 cup) airag

2 tablespoons sunflower oil (use any oil you prefer)

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

enough warm water to create a thick batter (about 250-350 ml (1-1 1/2 cups))

Mix all ingredients in a bowl, getting all the lumps out by squeezing them out with your hands. More lumps will prevent the formation of air bubbles, which gives this bread all its lift. Cover or wrap the bowl of bread with a rather large cloth or towel and place in a warm spot to rest as undisturbed as possible. The concern is not ruining the dough but not letting it have enough heat to make bubbles. Temperature control is key. Keep it there until it has risen somewhat, then transfer the dough to a greased baking tin. Cover the tin and keep it in a warm spot, the same one as before is ok, for at least 24 hours or longer if needed depending on how warm the spot is.

Preheat oven to 175C (350F). Bake bread for 40 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Enjoy!

Notes: If you keep this bread longer and do not eat it all at once, the bread will continue to ferment and may have a stronger yeasty taste the longer you keep it.