Twinkle's Kitchen | Gluten-free Chocolate Cake

I love chocolate cake, and I didn’t want to miss out on it once we switched over to a mainly gluten-free diet.

With a little trial and error, I managed to create a simply delicious sponge cake, rich and chocolaty, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

You can prepare this anytime, of course, but with a few tricks, you can turn this – and any other cake, gluten-free or not – into a heart-shaped delicious dessert.

My first go-around was a flourless cake, much like I’ve made before. Recipe  It turned out light and airy, with a crisp, crusty top, similar to an angel food cake.

Twinkle's Flourless Chocolate Cake recipe

But I really wanted dense, moist layers. More experimentation was required. I was determined I could get the consistency of non-gluten-free Devil’s Food cake.

The trick is in the butter and the eggs. There are not as many eggs as in a flourless recipe, but more yolks than whites. And there is the addition of a little more butter than a regular cake recipe.

Follow along at the end of the recipe for tips on creating a heart-shaped cake without buying any pans.

Gluten-free Devil’s Food Cake

Makes a 2-tier 8" cake

• 3 cups Twinkle’s all-purpose GF flour [recipe]
• 2 cups cocoa, sifted
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 ½ tbs. baking powder
• 2 tsp. sea salt
• 1 ½ cups unsalted butter, room
• 1 ½ cups light brown sugar
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 6 large eggs
• 4 egg yolks
• 2 tbs. vanilla
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 1 cup sour cream

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Line 2 8” round cake pans with parchment, and flour lightly.

Sift your first five ingredients together in a medium sized bowl.

Cream your butter in your mixer with the paddle attachment, until it becomes light-colored and fluffy.

Add in your sugars and cream for about 2-3 minutes, until well incorporated.

Add the eggs and the egg yolks one at a time to the sugar-butter mixture.

Add in your vanilla.

Turn your mixer on low speed and add the flour mixture, sour cream and the buttermilk, alternating each about ¼ cup at a time.

Let mix for one minute after everything is incorporated.

Pour into your prepared pans and cook for 35 minutes.

Let cool on a wire rack in pans for about 10 minutes, then flip out, leaving parchment circle on the bottom for another 10 minutes.

Remove parchment and let cool completely before icing or cutting into a different shape.

*For easier trimming of your cake, let the cake freeze for about 2-3 hours before cutting.

Watch a quick six second video on cutting the shape on Vine.

To create the heart shape from the round layers, trace a circle in parchment just like you would to line the cake pans.

Fold in half and draw a heart pattern.

Lay the pattern on top of your cake layers and cut around with a serrated knife creating your heart shape.

Ice with a crumb coat to keep cake from drying out, then ice with outer icing.

Decorate with frosting of your choice, fresh strawberries or chocolate shavings.

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Twinkle VanWinkle was born in a small town in Mississippi. A life-long lover of music, media and food, she grew up following those three things along her path. She has almost 20 years of professional cooking under her apron strings, feeding thousands of friends, family and other folks while working in restaurants and bakeries in Oxford, Miss. She baked apple pies for the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and appeared on Food Network's “The Best Of...” in the same year. Along with producing dynamic lifestyle content for LIN Media, she is a mother, musician and social media fanatic.

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