Let Me Eat Cake!

Today is my birthday, and I decided to bake myself a cake, but not just any cake…a gluten-free chocolate cake that a friend found online and emailed to me. As I’ve mentioned before, I am not allergic to gluten but am sensitive to wheat, so I try to avoid it when I can. Usually baked goods are a place where I make an exception, but this cake was too intriguing not to try! Unlike many other gluten-free cake recipes I have checked out, it doesn’t contain any difficult-to-find ingredients. Instead of flour, it uses quinoa! I love quinoa, and the idea that I can use it in a chocolate cake was just fantastic.

I made the cake this morning and was pleased with the ease of the recipe. I did have to cook the quinoa first and let it cool, and then the rest of the batter creation took place in my blender and a bowl, by hand…I didn’t even have to use my mixer! I did have a little trouble getting all of the batter out of the VitaMix blender, and unfortunately I didn’t have 8″ pans, only 9″, so my cake is a little bit larger and flatter than the photo with the recipe, but taste-wise it was a complete success!

The cake had just come out of the oven when I was leaving for a birthday lunch with a friend, so my darling husband took it out, let it cool, and had it frosted and ready on the cake stand when we returned. As my husband observed, it’s a slightly more dense cake than many made with flour, but it’s still delicious. We’ll have a few more friends over later for dinnertime slices so I will get some more opinions then, but so far it’s a unanimous success.

Here’s a link to the recipe, which comes from a book that was already on my wish list but has just been bumped to the top: Quinoa 365 by Patricia Green and Carolyn Hemming.

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