Ugliest Gluten Free Chocolate Cake

 Today is a pretty big day for us- we are celebrating our 4^th anniversary! Last night I decided I should bake a cake because obviously there is no better way to celebrate than by eating cake right? At least that's how my mind tends to work. However, we've been trying more and more to switch to gluten free products. This isn't out of necessity but for the health benefits accompanying the switch. Bleached flour for example has basically no nutritional value and will still add calories to your baked goods. So I decided that since we got a grain mill earlier this year I figured we could switch out the regular flour for garbanzo bean flour. Garbanzo beans provide loads protein and fiber along with calcium, magnesium, and iron to name a few good things about them.  Enough about the health benefits, everyone knows beans are good for you and I wanted to make a slightly healthier cake.

 If you read the grain mill article you'll remember I said you should grind A LOT at once. Well I don't always take my own advice so last night I had to begin at square one with making the cake. I got out the grain mill and ground up enough flour for the recipe- yes I still should have done a whole bag, but I only did what I needed. I would also recommend having a flour sifter- I do not have one of these and some of the resulting flour is a bit chunky for cooking. Oh well, I went for it anyway.  

 Another problem I ran into was that I actually had ZERO granulated sugar. You may be asking why I even tried to make a cake without having the ingredients or planned this out at all. I started asking myself that partially through the process, but I wanted to prove you can make do with what you have.  For the sugar I substituted 1 cup brown sugar and 1 ½ cups powdered sugar because I didn't even have enough brown sugar on hand to make this work. 

The Recipe:
2 ¾ C Garbanzo Bean Flour
1 ¾ C Sugar 

¾ C Cocoa Powder
2 t Baking Soda
1 ½ t Baking Powder
1 t Salt
2 Eggs
½ C Olive Oil
2 T Vanilla (I add lots because I love the Vanilla taste.  I also buy the fake stuff so you need more)
1 C Milk
1 C Boiling Water

• Preheat your oven to 350˚
• Combine your dry ingredients and mix well.
• Mix in your oil, milk, eggs, and vanilla. After these are mixed in, add in your boiling water. 
• Once everything is well mixed pour into two greased 8" round pans. 
• Bake for 35 minutes (check sooner depending on your oven). 

When they are done set out until cool. I turned mine upside down to cool and the middle collapsed a bit. Not sure why the edges rose higher than the center, I'll have to try to find a solution to that. The sunken center made the layer sit a little off, but it'll still taste good. Once the cake is cooled, you can frost it and I'm sure others will be able to frost a cake better than I can. I was hurrying so I could go to bed. I also added a bit too much milk so the frosting wasn't quite thick enough. So add the liquids slowly when you are making the frosting.

Frosting:
4 ½ C Powdered Sugar
½ C Butter (I use margarine-it's cheap J )
1 T Vanilla
3-4 T Milk

 Mix all ingredients well. Add more milk if frosting is too thick or reduce if you want a thicker frosting.
 I had a lot of frosting left after I covered the cake so I mixed in some cocoa powder to make it brown and added the text on top. Again, this looks a lot better if you don't have super runny frosting. Normally the frosting would actually hold the letters and not run together. I would have used food coloring, but as you probably have guessed, I didn't have any. Apparently the stash we had got lost when we moved last fall.  Anyway, so here you see it- The Ugliest Gluten Free Cake.  This just goes to show once again that you can't judge a book by its cover.  The cake was really good, so good that my dad actually had seconds. Plus, it wasn't very expensive to make. It was around $5 total and with how thick the cake turned out, it's approximately $0.20/serving. This is cheaper than having fruit snacks or most other bought snacks AND much healthier. Maybe gluten free doesn't have to be all that expensive.

Cost Breakdown:

Cake				Cost	Cost Recipe
Garbanzo Beans	2.75	C	0.846154	1.78	$1.51
Sugar	1.75	C	0.1875	1.98	$0.37
Baking Soda	2	t	0.020833	0.88	$0.02
Baking Powder	1.5	t	0.01875	1.38	$0.03
Vanilla	2	T	0.125	1.18	$0.15
Olive Oil	0.5	C	0.039431	21.98	$0.87
Eggs	2		0.166667	1.98	$0.33
Cocoa Powder	0.75	C		6.78	$0.64
Milk	1	C	0.011364	15.23	$0.17
Boiling Water	1	C	0	0	$0.00
					$4.08
Frosting
Powdered Sugar	4.5	C	0.619835	1.68	$1.04
Butter	0.5	C	0.25	0.88	$0.22
Vanilla	2	T	0.125	1.18	$0.15
Milk	3-4	T	0.002841	15.23	$0.04
					$1.45
			Total Cost		$5.53
			Servings		24
			Price/Serving		$0.28