“Let Them Eat Cake” Recipe Roundup

Okay. I had loads of questions about the “Let Them Eat Cake” recipes, especially the gluten free stuff, so I’m doing a round-up on them.

Gluten free, vegan carrot cake recipe with ‘cream cheese’ frosting. Contains flax ‘eggs’, which I’d never previously encountered and am now quite enamoured with as a substitution. Also, even fresh, that frosting tastes *remarkably* like cream cheese frosting, and if you stick it in the fridge overnight and serve it cold (it’s soft enough to spread onto a cake even when cold) it tastes exactly like cream cheese frosting. It’s amazing.

Gluten free, vegan peanut butter brownies. I didn’t think these were sweet enough, but their texture was really nice and not everybody likes things as sweet as I do. They were, however, corn-free (using black beans as their main bulk instead of gluten-free flour), and it turned out someone at the party couldn’t eat corn either, so there was something for everybody. :)

Sugar-free chocolate cake. I used xylitol instead of Splenda (they’re both 1:1 substitutes for sugar) and powdered some of the xylitol for a topping instead of making the sauce. Lawrence Watt-Evans thought it was the best of the cakes I made. :)

I had, in fact, been searching for an all-purpose vegan/gluten free/diabetic chocolate cake recipe, and didn’t, but having now learned about flax eggs I might try the diabetic cake recipe as also vegan/gluten-free sometime. I bet it’d work. :)

The lemon polenta cake and chocolate cake made by fellow baker & writer Susan Connolly were based on the above recipes with the following modifications:

For both, I used half the amount of ground almonds in the recipe, and made up the other half with hazelnuts that I food-processed until they were like crumbs – that gave it more texture.

For the lemon-cake, I used an extra lemon’s worth of zest in the mixture and an extra lemons worth of juice in the syrup.

Chocolate ganache was just 250ml of double cream, heated, then poured over 200g of dark chocolate that was broken into pieces, then stir stir stir till it’s combined.

(Much love to Susan for providing those two cakes, which were wonderful!)

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