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Tag Archives: cake

Gluten-free Chocolate Quinoa Cake

February 13, 2014 – 8:16 PM

The world is awash today with images of hearts and chocolate. Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. I know what you’re thinking. Chocolate, hearts, berries…but what’s Valentine’s Day without quinoa? I hear you, ye tired, hungry and gluten-free. Because having quinoa in your cake is like having dinner together with dessert. It’s just more efficient.

I happened upon this recipe at the Week of Menus blog. She must cook during the day because she has way better lighting than I do, and is reflecting on how to be a better mother while I am just thinking about my hair and thinking about how I can make dinner into a dessert. (I cut my hair. After a couple of weeks of awkward silences and people averting my gaze trying not to comment on it while I was figuring out how to work with it, I have finally found a way to make it look effortlessly tousled which requires way more time than if I tried to make it look like I made a concerted effort. But such is the price of beachy.)

Week of Menus has done a good job laying out the recipe, so I’ll just link to it below, but the basic gist is that you mix the quinoa in a blender with a bunch of stuff and end up with a batter that looks like this:

Bake it like she tells you to. I’m sorry, but making my hair look effortlessly tousled has drained me of my will to share detail. You’ll end up with a cake.

Then you can cut a heart out of wax paper, snowflake-style:

Place it over the cake and dust the top of the cake with powdered sugar:

End up with this:

So follow the recipe. Eat it. Enjoy.

Tags cake, chocolate, dessert, easy, gluten-free, quinoa | Permalink | Comments (5)

Cake Retrospective

September 20, 2012 – 4:00 AM

As some of you recall, before this year I was cursed with the inability to bake (anything that wasn’t hideous, anyway). And as one of my New Year’s resolutions, I set out to address this fatal flaw. For some context, here is an example of the type of cake I used to bake. Don’t look if you just ate.

Note the special type of two-layer cake where you can actually see from the outside that it’s two layers. And what is up with those strawberries?!? On a side note, my penmanship has gotten far worse over the years.

This next one is a little blurry, but just ask yourself when you look at it: does this look like an authorized Sanrio Hello Kitty product to you? (The cake, not the giant Hello Kitty in the chair.)

I had not yet discovered the round cake pan at this point in time. Nor did the internet have enough rich content on how to make an inoffensive cake. Cake pops weren’t even invented. And I thought it seemed wasteful to cut off bits of cake so that the layers could lie flat against each other. I call this the “Sloped Cake Style”. Other people call it “gross”.

As you may recall, I started off with cookies, which used to be a source of annual embarrassment for my neighborhood cookie exchange. I feel pretty good about my cookie progress. So it’s time to share some of what I’ve done with cakes.

Here is the very first cake that I’ve ever made that didn’t require me to serve people lots of alcohol ahead of time before unveiling:

I used marshmallow fondant to make the stars, letters and dolphin and piped the decoration on the edges. The cake was frosted in buttercream.

I also made some mini-cupcakes. They’re shown here on a cute little platter from Nora Fleming. It was for my husband’s birthday celebration so I put the margarita mini in.