Everybody needs a basic cake batter recipe to work from, even those who have a low tolerance for gluten. Fussellette was coming for Easter and I wanted to serve a cake for dessert. So I needed to come up with a cake that she could enjoy along with the rest of our guests.
This recipe is adapted from Martha Stewart’s Easy Cake Batter. I replaced the flour in the recipe with a gluten-free mix I came up with myself, with a little bit of help from Ellen’s Kitchen. If you are curious as to the right proportions when combining gluten-free flours, check out her suggestions — they are very useful.
First we want to bring all our liquid ingredients to room temperature: 1 cup butter, 4 large eggs plus 2 large egg yolks, and 1 1/2 cups buttermilk (or soured milk). If you want to warm up your ingredients a little faster, try placing them in a warm water bath.
In a bowl, whisk together 2 cups white rice flour, 2/3 cup almond meal (I find that the coarseness of the almond meal gives the cake crumb a springy, solid texture, with no fear of it falling if handled too roughly), 1/3 cup tapioca starch/flour, and1 tablespoon baking powder. So the final result of this particular combination tastes like a sweet, more tender version of cornbread — it has a finer texture but that’s the best analogy I can come up with.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together your butter with 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar, until it’s light and fluffy and creamy. Don’t rush this process. Let your mixer go on high for about 6 minutes, and you will see the difference between butter and sugar that are just well-combined versus butter and sugar that are well and truly creamed together. This is the just-combined stuff.
This is the truly creamed stuff. It makes all the difference in a cake, especially one where you need all the help you can get to keep the structure light and fluffy.
Mix in your eggs, one at a time, until they are well-combined. Again, you add the eggs a bit at a time so that the mixer paddle will have a chance to properly emulsify all of it.
Add in at this point 1 tablespoon vanilla extract.
Flip the mixer to its lowest setting and mix in about a third of your flour mixture. Pour in half the buttermilk and let that get mixed in as well. Then another third of your flour, mix that in, and the rest of the buttermilk. When that’s mixed in, add the last of the flour and mix until just combined. You may need to scrape down the sides of the bowl. This picture is blurry because I like to cook in motion.
Now you have a basic batter with which you can do pretty much anything. You can turn it into a layer cake, or mix it with other flavours like chocolate or fruit. Or you can make it into cupcakes, like I did here (the frosting is a package of cream cheese mixed with a cup of icing sugar and some coconut).
This cake here I wrapped up and froze for a future event.
For Easter I poured the batter into two pans and then layered the cake with whipped cream mixed with raspberries. DIVINE.
Ali Does It Herself 