Good Fucking Gluten Free Devil’s Food Cake
In addition to the Witch’s Skull I also made the Pretty One a similarly themed Skull Cake. The first cake I ever made and it was a gluten and almost dairy free cake. I can’t bake. I mainly can’t bake because I like to make up my own instructions for doing things based loosely on whatever actual instructions are in front of me. This serves me well in every other creative venture outside of baking. Baking, however, is a rigid bitch with too many rules and gluten free baking is a fascist headmistress who lures you with soft promises of succulent delight but leaves you an actuality of sand, gravel and crushed dreams.
There was hope. A little while back I had a cupcake made by a good friend who has Celiac Disease and, knowing they were gluten free, they were really freaking good. She let me know that they were made with Betty Crocker’s Gluten Free Devil’s Food Cake Mix. So, I figured, a Betty Crocker Mix was foolproof, let’s give the bitch a try.
As I was reading reviews of the mix on Amazon they all solidly read “This cake mix is the greatest thing that ever happened to me since I went gluten free, goddamnit all that weight is going to come back”. You always have to read gluten free food reviews with a grain of salt though, many of these are from people that are trying to grasp onto anything that could return to them that lost joy of deeply satisfying baked good whose abandonment has left their souls with a personal void so deep it draws madness. This loss can create a vacuous mind that may grasp onto any dry morsel and believe it to be a holy loaf of sacramental bread.
So, I dug a little deeper armed with the knowledge that having tasted cupcakes from this mix, even if my mind was skewed a bit, they were tasty. There must be someone out there who also made them luscious. With some quick Google-Fu katas I came across this and found my instructions beyond the regular instructions that I would also have to make up my own instructions for.
Betty Crocker’s Gluten-Free Mixes – almost as good as the original
That recipe was for an improvement on the Yellow Cake version so I figured I’d adapt it for the chocolate. You can see the full recipe I came up with, and mostly followed, here…
The only differences to what I typed up and ended up with was that after I mixed all of the dry ingredients I split the dry mix in half to make a half batch with about half of the required wet ingredients. I also reserved some of the frosting before adding the melted chocolate to keep it white for drip-painting the skull on top of the chocolate frosting. I also cut back a little on the sugar in the frosting but it did end up thinner than I’d like, so I probably wouldn’t do that again.
The flavor turned out very well, beautifully rich. It was a bit dense though, but that could have also been because it was immediately refrigerated and then packed in a cooler full of ice, never to return to room temperature until it was consumed. Last I heard, it was consumed with joy, Skull-Devilry joy.
