Cake Revisited, Gladys and Quiche

We had chocolate cake leftovers for dessert tonight since the guinea pigs family testers didn't eat the whole thing last night. I found that the cake did have the signature sandiness that gluten free baked goods seem to have.  The cake was cooled off completely last night but for some reason it didn't seem as sandy as it did today.  Weird.  It is still a really good cake and I will make it again.

After reading a bunch of stuff about cooking gluten free I decided to buy sorghum flour since it most closely resembles wheat flour in baking.  My plan is to put together a good bread recipe with little to no rice flour.  We shall see.  Bread is one of my specialties and baked goods made with yeast as well.  I even had a wonderful sourdough starter named Gladys that made the best breads and rolls.  Sadly she got a bit over-yeasty.  In other words she got moldy.  Gotta love Florida.  

                            Gladys made this loaf and rolls.  Awesome!

 
Now, I have to learn how to bake bread all over again using different flours with different qualities for baking.  UGH.

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For dinner tonight I decided on quiche and looked up making pie crusts GF.  Hmm, I got really lazy.  On Gluten Free Cooking School the author made quiche using very thin slices of potato to line the pie plate as the crust.  The potato "crust" is baked in the oven for about 15 minutes and then you take it out and add the quiche ingredients.  Bake this for about 40 to 45 minutes.  It worked very well!  I followed the directions for the potato crust then used my own quiche filling.  It turned out great! Thank you Mary Frances from Gluten Free Cooking School!
 

Chocolate Cake!!

CAKE!  Get your attention?  Who doesn't like chocolate cake, really?  

I've been playing around with different recipes and mixes that are gluten free so I can plan the food for the holidays and for my daughter's baby shower.  I'd like everything to be gluten free since I am eating at those times plus I am the one making everything (for the most part).  This means using my family as guinea pigs test subjects to try out everything I make.  The more the merrier so I can get some good feedback.

Tonight's test product was chocolate cake from a recipe found at Eating Gluten Free.  This website is brought to you by the authors of the cookbook, Life Tastes Good Again.

The cake starts out with a gluten free flour mixture that is used in many of their recipes.  This mixture consists of rice flour, potato starch and tapioca flour.  To this is added xanthan gum for texture.  

See the recipe here:
Chocolate Cake
(click on the "chocolate cake" tab)

I followed the recipe exactly but put the batter into three 8" round cake pans, greased and floured with the GF flour mixture.  This makes a lovely three layer cake.

The three round cakes took about 25 minutes in my oven to bake.  They looked and smelled just like chocolate cake.  Surprise, surprise!

                                              Cakes cooling completely

I cooled these cakes completely before I turned them out onto the racks.  Once I was ready to assemble I was a little concerned about the texture and worried that they would break up when I tried to move them.  No worries!  These handle just like any other cake layers.

I decided on buttercream for the frosting in a plain vanilla so we could see how it was on this particular chocolate cake.  Since I made three layers there wasn't really enough frosting to cover all around the sides of the cake but since this was an experiment anyway, I didn't really mind.

                              The not well iced cake.  Looks a little sad here


The family liked this cake quite a bit.  My parents thought that it tasted just like chocolate cake and no one thought the texture was odd.  Believe me, if anyone would think something was odd, it would be my folks.  Nope, they liked it!  The baby shower will have cupcakes so I think I will use this recipe for that.  The cake seemed to have the proper consistency to become cupcakes.  

Great chocolate cake!