Alana
Last week was Katherine’s birthday! In celebration a handful of us went out for dinner at Remedy Cafe. Remedy is an Edmonton cafe that serves a wicked chai latte, has delicious Indian food, and a large assortment of desserts. We could have bought Katherine some cake, but that just isn’t very me.
One of the girls has Celiac Disease so I went with a gluten free cake, because cake is best enjoyed among all the friends present 🙂 In the past I’ve used Betty Crocker gluten free cake mix and had my cakes turn out quite well. I asked my mother to pick up a gluten free cake mix for me, and she picked out a mix from XO Baking Co. I’ve never used or heard of this company, but I crossed my fingers and proceeded with my plan. The box said “moist and delicious!” on it, so it had to be good, right?
I decided that a 6 inch cake would work best, because there were only going to be 5 of us at dinner. Big birthday cakes are great, but that is just a LOT of cake to eat. I figured that I would just make cupcakes with the extra batter, but I found that there was just enough batter to make 3 1 inch tall layers. It’s almost a good thing that there weren’t too many of us!
You can see that the batter looks a little bit granular
I niibbled on the shavings from levelling the cake and the flavour was excellent! The chocolatey-ness may have been due to cup of chocolate chips I added, but I think that they may not have been necessary! I also didn’t find the cake to be dry at all, which was a relief, though the texture seemed a little bit grainy. Mike tried some of the trimmings as well, but claims he didn’t notice.
Katherine’s is big on purple so obviously I planned to make the cake purple. I wanted it to be pretty bright, but I didn’t have a specific colour in mind. I used AmeriColour gels in electric purple and electric pink, adding alternating drops of colour until I decided the frosting was an acceptable brightness. That turned out to be ridiculously bright.
I did find that the frosting was quite light, which was lovely but it was a little bit unstable under the weight of the assembled cake. I popped the cake in the fridge for 20 minutes post-crumb coat to prevent the middle layers of frosting squishing out.
Once my base of frosting was complete I was a bit at a loss for how to decorate. I took a page out of Sweetapolita’s book (metaphorically, though she does have a delightful bake book!) and went for the sprinkles. I did the top, but then sides seemed so bare and lonely. I didn’t want to end up tipping my cake on it’s side, so I was initially not quite aggressive enough with the angle I lifted it to. Once there were sprinkles flying all over my counter I was a little more willing to lean it over. It felt like I used a lot of sprinkles on the sides, but I definitely could have put more on.
The sad part is that we didn’t actually eat any cake! We were all so stuffed from Remedy’s delicious food that we had no more room for dessert. I sent the cake home with Katherine and according to her it was “SOOOOOOOOOOO good!!” I’ll take her word for it!
To frost my cake I used Sweetapolita’s recipe for Whipped Vanilla Bean Frosting. I didn’t use a vanilla bean, so I think the extra liquid from the vanilla (I used 2 tsp) probably made my frosting less stable. An extra 5 ml doesn’t seem like a lot, but frosting doesn’t take a lot to thin it out.
Gluten Free Double Chocolate Chip Birthday Cake
Ingredients
- 1 box of gluten free chocolate cake mix
- 1 cup chocolate chips
- The things it says you need on the box. In my case that is as follows
- 2 eggs
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil (I used avocado oil… just because)
- ¾ cup milk (my box says that any dairy alternative is 100% okay)
- ¾ cup boiling/hot water
Directions
- Prepare your baking pans by placing parchment paper circles on the bottom, and greasing the sides. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
- Add the cake mix, eggs, milk and oil to the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix until smooth.
- Add the boiling water slowly, making sure to scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula a few times. Add the chocolate chips and mix until incorporated.
- Divide the batter between your pans equally (will be on the liquidy-er side), and bake as per the directions on the box (I used 6″ pan and divided my batter into thirds. They baked for about 33-35 minutes).
- Let cakes cool for 5-10 minutes on a wire rack before removing them from the pans.
- Cool completely, then decorate with frosting.
Chateau Gateau 