Chocolate cake – allergy friendly, indulgent & healthy

Well, as healthy as the word goes with cake! Better than many options and yay this one is coconut free!

Having three kids means not only three birthday cakes a year, but I also have to make cake every time someone else has a birthday celebration so my lot don’t have to miss out. My usual go to cake has coconut oil and coconut flour which I can’t have this year because I’m breastfeeding our baby with a coconut allergy. I love the wacky cake recipe for its allergy friendliness using gluten free flour. Not so much all the sugar though. And quite frankly I feel like I’ve made about ten wacky cakes this last year due to ease and it being a fairly fail safe and crowd pleasing cake. But for Hazel’s first birthday this year I wanted to make her a cake with a little less sugar and a little more goodness.

So here came this recipe, gluten free, dairy free, soy free (though the chocolate I use in the ganache does contain soy lethicin, which we are ok with), nut free, egg free, coconut free, refined sugar free and contains vegetables. Now that’s a cake I’m happy for miss 12 months to scoff. And me, I was also happy to scoff this cake. It was truely delicious. It freezes well, so you can make ahead. I doubled the mixture and divided it into three, to make a three layer cake.

Ingredients

1/2 c cocoa or cacao powder
1c gluten free flour (I used Edmonds gf plain flour)
2 Tb psyllium husk (most supermarkets stock this in the health food section)
2 tsp baking soda + 1 tsp cream of tartar (OR 2 tsp baking powder)

2 c Kumara (purple skin) or carrot finely grated
1/2 c maple syrup (or make a syrup with 1/2 cup sugar + 1/3 cup boiling water, then cooled)
1/2 c water
1/2 c oil (I used light olive oil)
1 t vanilla extract

what to do

Preheat oven to 160 deg fan forced (180 deg regular).

Measure out the wet ingredients + grated veg and add them to a bowl. Sift over all the dry ingredients and mix together. Let it sit for a couple minutes while you grease your cake pan, it will thicken as it sits. Pour into very well greased or lined cake tin (recommend a spring form tin).

Cook for approximately 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. And it feels the same to touch in the middle as it does round the sides.

Cake notes:

If doubling the mix and dividing into three cakes, cook each cake for 20 minutes.

I make a chocolate ganache using two blocks of Whittaker’s dark chocolate, melted with 3/4 cup of almond milk and spread this between the layers with refined sugar free raspberry jam and also used the ganache to coat the outside of the cake to make it smooth for the white fondant icing over the top.

To make this cake, after I assembled with the ganache, I rolled out ready made white fondant icing and placed it over the top of the whole cake. I made two plaits with the remains and curved them into a circle on the top. Then added the fresh berries just before serving.

I assembled the cake and ganache then froze the whole cake overnight before adding the white icing on the day, then let it to sit out and thaw until later in the day.

Chocolate cake – real food and top 8 free!

So this recipe stems from an original recipe, a somewhat famous cake in the real food world – the 84th and 3rd chocolate cake! The original recipe calls for pumpkin and has eggs in it, so we have made some adjustments to the ratios and ingredients, by changing out for seasonal veggies and substituting the eggs. If you are not egg free then go check out the 84th and 3rd best real food chocolate cake recipe ever ! (but stick around here for the marshmallow icing!)

This recipe has been tried and tested half a dozen times between Justine at Our Kitchen Adventures and Myself. She was kind enough to adapt the original recipe first and share it with me! I have also made the original recipe, which isn’t egg free, for Ashton’s birthday, when Felix was too little to eat cake! I’ve made it with pumpkin, kumara (sweet potato) and carrot, i’m not a huge fan of the pumpkin version, but kumara and carrot are both delicious. This time i used carrot because kumara is like $10 a kilo right now!

Justine from Our Kitchen Adventures made the cake for her sons 2nd birthday dinosaur party.
And for her son’s Thunderbird’s birthday party

Ingredients

Cake:
1/2 c cocoa or cacao powder
1/4 c coconut flour
2 Tb psyllium husk
1 t cream of Tatar
2 t baking soda*
1/2 c maple syrup***
1/2 c water
1/2 c coconut oil
2 c Kumara, carrot or pumpkin finely grated
1 t vanilla extract
* or 1 t baking soda and 1 t baking powder

Chocolate Icing:
1 block dark dairy free chocolate (this part is not refined sugar free! the darker the chocolate the less sugar it has)**
1 400ml can coconut cream
1 t vanilla extract
** for a refined sugar free icing do try to the 84th and 3rd dairy free ‘buttercream’!)

what to do

Preheat oven 180 degrees c.

Cake

Put all the wet ingredients into a bowl and stir in the finely grated vege.

Sift the dry ingredients on top and then mix everything together, let sit for 5 mins for the mixture to thicken slightly.

line a cake tin with baking paper. I used a 18cm cake tin and split the mix in two to make two thin layers – so for the whole cake i made three batches of cake and 6 layers. (i made 1 batch a night and froze the layers to minimize the kitchen marathon!)

if you are doing two layers, bake each layer for 20 – 25 minutes, or a full cake batch for 35 minutes. lift out the baking paper and carefully place on a wire rack to cool. Without eggs to bind the cake is fragile so minimal handling works best. If you are wanting to layer or shape it, i recommend freezing for for easier handling. It freezes and defrosts beautifully, and actually tastes better after a couple days in the fridge!

icing

Melt the chocolate and add the coconut cream, refrigerate for an hour or so until firm then whip the mixture on high using an electric beater until fluffy and spreadable.

layer up with choc ganache icing between each layer, we also added strawberry chia-seed jam between each layer too, which was delicious!

If you want to add the marshmallow layer on the top then the instructions for that is here. Otherwise use this as your canvas to create whatever you want!

This part could be made a couple days in advance and stored in the fridge then the marshmallow icing added on the day or day before.

***for two of the cake batches i ran out of maple syrup! So i used coconut sugar made into a syrup, by measuring out half a cup of coconut sugar, then pouring boiling water over to reach the half cup measurement and stirring to dissolve.

Marshmallow Icing

This is what I poured over the top of Felix’s birthday cake in the weekend, to get the yellow drizzle topping.  You can find lots of party snack photos on our facebook page and i’ll add more recipes for everything throughout the coming week.

Ingredients

1 cup water
3 Tbsp gelatin (we use great lakes or vital proteins)
100g honey or maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt
Natural colour if you wish (i used 1/4 tsp turmeric, beetroot powder would probably work for pink – use your imagination im sure the natural colour options are endless.

what to do

put 1/2 the water in a large mixing bowl with the gelatin and leave to bloom while you prepare the honey.

In a saucepan heat the honey, water, vanilla, natural colour and salt until melted and combined.
Using an electric beater or stand mixer, start to beat the gelatin and water on low, while slowly pouring in the honey mix. Once combined turn the speed up to high and beat until it starts to become fluffy marshmallow texture, can take anywhere between 5 and 15 mins depending on the speed of your beater. Mine takes no longer than ten mins.

I’m not sure if i over beat it every time, but i find it sets too fast to ice a cake with, so i then melt it in the microwave ever so slightly (5 seconds at a time!) to make it a pour-able texture. Don’t worry if you melt it too much – it will firm back up on standing! But you need to make sure its loose enough or it won’t pour over the cake!

Depending on your climate it might set out of the fridge (its freezing at my house!) otherwise an hour or two in the fridge will firm it up.
Alternatively pour into a baking paper lined tin and cut into squares of marshmallow when set.