Marble Cake = Happy Me

One of the things that I miss the most about gluten is marble cake. You can find decent GF mixes for chocolate cake. Yellow cake is yummy but I can live without it. Spice cake isn't really my thing (unless it has cream cheese frosting, but then I just tend to lick off the cream cheese frosting and ignore the spice cake part).

But marble cake! Chocolate and yellow combined, and it's so much fun to swirl them together. Every year for my birthday, I picked marble cake. Every year I begged my mom to let me swirl the batter around with a knife. And okay, another facet of my weird nature is that I will only eat one food at a time. I'm not a total freak--the food can be touching each other (although I prefer not get, say, spaghetti sauce on my green beans). But I'll eat all the spaghetti and THEN I'll eat my green beans. When I used to be able to eat black-and-white cookies, I ate all the chocolate parts first and then the vanilla. Unlike Jerry Seinfeld, to me the point was to keep the two flavors completely seperate. Oh, and those Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies with the little holiday pictures in the middle? I think you know how I handled that: I ate all the plain cookie part so that I was left with just the little picture part, and then ate that last.

Oh yeah. I eat like a two-year-old.

But marble cake was the one exception to this rule. I never tried to keep chocolate and vanilla apart; I just loved the soft, yummy combo. It's true. I allowed the two flavors to comingle on my taste buds, and I LOVED it.

Alas, I have been bereft of this singular beauty since I was diagnosed with celiac. Until today!

I recently got a cookbook from the library called "The Everything Chocolate Cookbook." Being, of course, a chocolate lover, I immediately had to get the book. Especially considering that it included a recipe for chocolate chip cheesecake (which needs its own post, so I won't go into that lovliness here). Anyway, lo and behold, in the cake section, they had a recipe for . . . drumroll . . . marble cake!! Woohoo!!! And it's pretty simple; I don't know why I didn't just think of making a chocolate cake and a yellow cake and then swirling the batters together. But whatever, I was totally jazzed to try out the recipe.

Until I saw that it called for cake flour.

Now, gluten free flour I can handle. I have a flour recipe that you can pretty much exchange for regular flour anywhere you want. But cake flour? What the heck was cake flour and was there a GF alternative?

This is where Google comes in. I found a page explaining cake flour here, and voila, I could make my own.

I made the cake this afternoon, and let me tell you, this elusive cake flour seems to be the key to GF baking. Moist, light, and fluffy, the finished product had absolutely none of the heaviness and grainy texture that all my from-scratch bakery has had up til now. It's amazing! Even my mom, who is not gluten-free, said that it tasted like real cake. High praise, my friends, because my mom generally hates everything I bake unless it's from a mix (she says she likes the stuff, but you can totally tell from her eyes that she's just humoring me and really can't wait to go wash her mouth out with Listerine).

Anyway, I had to change the original recipe a little. It didn't call for any milk and the batter definitely wasn't liquid-y enough, so I added some. And I added that other magic GF ingredient: xanthum gum.

I also had a ton of chocolate batter left over, and so I made some chocolate cupcakes (I owe this brilliant suggestion to my mother, who may humor me when she tastes things but always comes to my rescue when I inevitably freak out over some small mistake). Those came out of the oven already and like I said, taste normal. The cake just came out of the oven and so was too hot to taste test, but it looks just like the cupcakes (except, you know, swirly with vanilla), and so I'm expecting a truly yummylicious taste.

One of the cupcakes, hilariously, looked like it had a little mouth on top, so I walked around making it talk to everyone. I took a video of it for you, but sadly am having trouble uploading it. Apparently my computer hates my camera. I'll try to have it for my next post


So here's the recipe. Happy baking!

GLUTEN FREE MARBLE CAKE, adapted from The Everything Chocolate Cookbook

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

chocolate cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum
1/4 cup nonalkaline cocoa powder

Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.

yellow cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum

Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.

liquid ingredients:
1 stick butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (make sure it's GF!)
3 eggs, warmed to room temperature
2 cups milk

Using an electric mixer on medium speed, cream together the butter and the sugar. Add the vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until thoroughly blended.

Divide the egg batter into two equal parts. Fold the yellow cake mixture into one and the chocolate cake mixture into the other.

Grease and flour an 8x8 square pan or a 9" round pan. Pour one of the batters into the pan. Carefully place spoonfuls of the other flavor on top of the first, in equal increments. Gently swirl the batters together using the tip of a knife.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. For cupcakes, set oven temperature to 375 degrees F and bake for 15 minutes.

Frost and enjoy!