Recently someone posted a link to this easy cake recipe on one of the EGID support group forums I belong to on Facebook.  I was soon drawn to its simplicity, not least because it was already dairy-, soya- and egg-free, but also because the comments that followed suggested it could be easily converted to a gluten-free recipe too.  What was even better was that I had the perfect occasion to try the recipe out – my Mum’s birthday.  As you may recall, we had planned a special afternoon tea at the Grand Floridian whilst we were on holiday, but the actual date was now approaching and we had a family lunch booked for the day itself.

I think it would be fair to say that my Mum is an avid chocolate-lover, one might almost say a chocoholic and there used to be a time when you’d be hard pressed to find her without an emergency chocolate bar stashed in her handbag, glove box or on the top shelf of the fridge.  Bearing that in mind, it was something of a no-brainer to decide on a cake that would satisfy her idea of chocolate heaven.  The bigger challenge was in making that creation both deliciously decadent and M-friendly.

I doubled up the quantities in the chocolate crazy cake recipe and chose to mix the ingredients in a bowl, rather than in the cake tins themselves as I wanted to make 3 individual layers to sandwich together.  I replaced the flour with a blend of rice and tapioca flour and added a pinch of xanthum gum to help it on its way.  The cakes that came out of the oven appeared to be beautifully moist and not too granular, although Mike’s first comment on tasting some of the trimmings was that they were a lot sweeter than my usual bakes.  I swirled vanilla butter-cream icing with spoonfuls of Grandma’s strawberry jam (all the way from Canada) and used this to sandwich the layers together.  Lashings of home-made chocolate butter-cream icing then covered the entire cake, before I finished it all off with a generous sprinkle of pearl drops, moo-free chocolate buttons and shavings of moo-free orange chocolate.

It looked like my idea of a chocolate-lover’s dream birthday cake and tasted good too.  My Mum thought adding raspberries would have added a little sharpness to cut through the sweetness of the chocolate, but there wasn’t much left after her meal, which is always a sign of a good bake!