The Making of a New Family Mix and Match Recipe for GFCF Chocolate Cake

Remember the Bill Cosby skit:  “Dad is great.  Give us the chocolate cake!”  It is exactly what was going through my mind one Tuesday morning last month when I realized that I was out of many of our usual breakfast food ingredients, but had just spied a recipe for Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake on the side of our light buckwheat flour bag.

A more thorough perusal of the recipe revealed that we did not have all the ingredients listed in it in the house either.  However, we did have substitutes that I thought would work, such as almond butter for peanut butter and clementines to blend in place of apple sauce, agave in place of sugar.  With these, the cake would not just be doable, but seemed like an almost healthy option for breakfast.  Sure, the recipe called for a fair amount of sugar.  But, with the way we were making it, that sugar would be low glycemic-index sugar and would be countered by fresh produce and organic nut butter protein.  That makes it good for the body, right?

A Plan Comes Together

So it was that I decided that my children and I would all indulge in chocolate cake as our “filling breakfast” that morning even though we usually reserve chocolate for Sundays. 

As my children ate a fresh, produce power appetizer, I set the oven to pre-heat and assembled ingredients and baking tools.  Then, my baking assistants got to work helping me to prepare the cake.

Fifty minutes later, after the cake had baked and cooled, Luke asked if he could “decorate” it by carving letters into it with a knife.  Permission granted, he carved a small F L B into it, which he told me stood for “for lunch and breakfast” – the times he felt we should eat the cake.

Decoration done, we dug in.

The verdict?

Luke gave it a thumbs up an wanted more-more-more.  Jack liked it, too.  Nina thought it needed butter or powdered sugar atop it, which I nixed. 

Later that day, Daddy devoured the portion of the cake we had saved for him.   So, the recipe is a keeper.

A keeper, that is, for everyone but Nina.  She whined loudly about the cake the first time we made it for breakfast until she finally wound down  and decided to munch upon a self-selected cold, alternative from the fridge for breakfast (leftover sea-salted edamame). Now, this begs the question, What child does that?  Whines over chocolate cake and eats cold edamame?  Really?  But while I will continue to wonder if Nina really is mine and Mike’s (because how can a child of ours not devour anything chocolate), I will not complain about her choice.  (It meant all the more cake for the rest of us.)

Nina's balking also inspired me to experiment with the recipe further in a quest to find a combination of ingredients that would please her palette as much as the rest of ours.  Thus...

The Mix and Match Recipe

I developed the cake into a mix-and-match recipe, which you can access as a Mix-and-Match GFCF Chocolate Cake printable freebie here.

Enjoy and let us know which combination you find the tastiest!