Saturday 27 September 2014

Gluten free pistachio cake



Yesterday I left you with this picture.


It's a gluten free pistachio cake.  Whenever I bake gluten free cakes I add ground almonds to keep the moisture level up.  Gluten free cakes can taste chalky and no one wants that in a cake.  My step mum has to eat a gluten free diet and so when she joined our family a whole new challenge came into baking.  I found gluten-free flour very odd at first (and made some shocking disasters).  I've played about with honey, milk, cream, fruit and nuts to keep it moist and ground almonds are by far the best.

You want a cake to taste like a cake, no matter whether it has gluten in it or not.  It's really not fair to hold up your hands and say sorry it's a bit crap….I used gluten free flour. (Fine, you might not be eating it, but other people have to.)

Anyway….back to the cake.  

I decided, whilst the blackberry bread was proving for the first time, that I wanted to make a cake for Cara, my baby brother's girlfriend.  She has recently got some rather wonderful A-level results and got into the University of her choice, so we'd been invited for a hog roast with her family (It was a "meet the family" type of thing.  I'm surprised we could be trusted to meet her family.)

Problem was………I didn't have any ground almonds.

I DID have a packet of pistachios though, so thought that if I blitzed them then they'd probably have the same effect….being nuts, and all….

Cara is a big fan of a multicoloured cake, so green seemed like a logical decision.


On Sunday morning I set to work icing it.  I wanted to use buttercream as I recently learned that if you want lighter buttercream you should keep beating as it gets whiter the more you beat it. (Please tell me I wasn't the only one who has only found that out……..?)

You can't really tell from the pictures but it was a really light cream colour….I was really impressed!


The swirls were done by piping a vertical line of blobs and using the back of a teaspoon to "sploosh" (very technical term) one side down.  To make it easier I had a mug of boiling water that I put the spoon in between the lines.

The top might be a bit wonky but I was so pleased with the way it turned out.



Someone else thought it was "ok".

It's a wonder it wasn't eaten by the boys before it reached Cara.  







It was joked about, before it was cut, that I might have mucked up the order of the layers……nothing like support from your family, is there?


SHARE:

1 comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
© Howard's House. All rights reserved.
Blogger Templates by pipdig