It is absolutely freezing here in the Adelaide Hills this morning, to the marrow cold, so I thought I would have a little play in the Cookie House where the ovens keep it all nice and warm. Want to come with? Excellent, let’s make something DELICIOUS!
Having had a rummage through the stores to see what I have, I find we have the makings for some gorgeous little cakes. Now because I am wanting to eat these myself we must work within my dietary parameters, but that is okay, this is a tried and true recipe that even people without any food intolerances at all love and it freezes well so you can make up a heap and put them in the freezer to enjoy at any time.
Ingredients
65g dates, chopped roughly
120ml water
3g baking powder
75g sugar
25ml olive oil
30g coconut flour
42g tapioca flour
5g baking powder (additional)
20g dried cranberries, chopped a little finer
2 eggs
100g frozen raspberries
50g dark chocolate, cut into chunks
Now to start with we are going to make our mucilage, that sounds gross, but it is what I use to bind, to add moisture and to give that luxurious ‘cake’ feeling to my gluten free cakes that so many gluten free delicacies lack.
Place your dates into your water in a small pot, bring to the boil, add your first bit of baking powder, let it sit for about two minutes off the heat add your sugar and olive oil and then purée. It should look like this -
This will make your end result cakes a little darker but I don’t worry about that, this is our base and it is what makes this cake stand out against other gluten free cakes. It means that we do not need to add things like xanthan gum or psyllium husk, just this rich and luscious date mixture.
Get your oven preheating to 170 degrees C, fan forced, if you don’t have a fan forced oven you can make it ten degrees hotter.
In a separate bowl mix together your additional baking powder, coconut flour, tapioca flour and chopped cranberries.
Into the date mixture stir your eggs and then your combined flours, then add your frozen raspberries and last your chocolate chunks.
Pour into your chosen receptacle, as you can see I am using a mini loaf tin because I would like these to be a little bit bigger than a standard cupcake or muffin tin would give me (greedy me), and I always line the bottom of the tin with a cartouche (a little rectangle of baking paper. This made five.
Into your preheated oven and let them cook until they are nicely brown and cooked through, give them a poke on top, make sure they spring back, or insert a skewer to check for doneness if you are unsure, skewer should come out with no wet cake mix on it if they are done.
These look pretty good to me. Turn them out onto a rack and allow to cool if you can resist eating them at once. I can’t. Let’s break one open and have a look.
Yes, I am very happy with that, full of fruit and chocolate, and nice and moist and cakey looking. But how do they taste???
MMMMMMMMMM!
Gosh it’s a shame that only made five.
For interest’ sake and because I can never leave anything alone, and mainly because all of these mysteriously disappeared, I made another batch today, this time I doubled the mixture and added 12g of cocoa with the dry ingredients, the verdict? JUST AS DELICIOUS!!!
I don’t know that they were all that different really, perhaps a little bit richer, anyway, it is up to you, either way is very good.
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