This chocolate vanilla bean cake was epic to make: four layers of one of my favorite chocolate cake recipes, layered with silky, gorgeously-easy and indulgent vanilla bean pastry cream (with a touch of bourbon because why the heck not), rich chocolate buttercream (also with a touch of bourbon), and a ganache drip. And tons of flowers! Sometimes the classic combos like vanilla and chocolate are the absolute winners, and that certainly is the case with this cake. For those of you who haven’t tried making pastry cream yet, let me be the first to welcome you to the world of SUCH easy and mind-blowing-amazingness. Pastry cream comes together in under…
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Gluten Free Rainbow Pride Cake
We are very very pleased to FINALLY present our very first actual rainbow pride cake!! It’s been a long time coming – mostly due to the fact that I was wildly intimidated to make a multi-layer, multi-colored cake and kept worrying that the colors would turn brown or not look great. But here we are, nearly the end of June with this fan-freaking-tastic EIGHT-layer gluten free Pride Cake, which not only boasts eight stunning colors, but eight stunning flavors as well. YES, you heard that right – to further embody the glorious array of everyone who celebrates who they are in all of our various colors, we wanted to add…
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Gluten Free Guava Cake with Cream Cheese Buttercream
The wonderful thing about flavor is that there is so much of it in the world. Growing up in rural southern Oregon, I never once had guava, but years later, thanks to friends and travel and happy strangers, I’ve now fallen in love with it. The first time I actually had guava was when I was living in the Galapagos, conducting my undergraduate thesis research with a load of astonishingly patient teachers, principals, and 8th graders on three of the islands (yes, there are over 30,000 people who live in the Ecuadorian Archipelago!). One of the best restaurants on the main street in Puerto Ayora, the town on Santa Cruz…
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Gluten Free Raspberry Chocolate Layer Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Buttercream
Is there anything better than a slice of gloriously-rich chocolate cake. Rhetorical, of course. This one was a particular stunner: four layers of the fluffiest, most decadent gluten free chocolate cake layers you’ll ever eat, filled with chocolate cream cheese buttercream (YES you heard that right – cream cheese frosting in CHOCOLATE? yes), raspberry puree + preserves, and bright raspberry whipped cream, and enrobed in more chocolate cream cheese buttercream, a rich chocolate ganache drip, and topped with gorgeous fresh flowers and raspberries. Just go ahead and let out that sigh of relief that it’s ALL GLUTEN FREE and serve yourself a second or third piece. One of the best…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Layer Cake with Cream Cheese Buttercream
There’s something about cream cheese frosting. For all of you lactose/dairy-free folk out there, I feel your pain – as a weird and twisted side effect of Celiac disease, I also lost the ability to digest lactose for years before and after diagnosis, so I’m quiiiiite familiar with the array of nut, rice, and soy mylks and cheeses out there, and Kendra, the younger taller sister of Sisters Sans Gluten, is still dairy free to this day! (she makes a mean dairy free cheesecake too). This cake, however, is definitely heavy on the dairy. Gotta love swoops of silky, slightly-tangy cream cheese buttercream wrapped around summery strawberry cake layers, billowy…
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Gluten Free Vanilla Bean & Chocolate Layer Cake
Sometimes you save a very-ambitious baking project for the day-of and sometimes it takes a biiiiiit longer to pull it all together than anticipated and sometimes that means you end up taking photos of it after the sun has DEFINITELY set (thanks Winter) so they turn out a bit grainier and darker than you planned. And that sometime was THIS time, but I’m still excited because it was the first time working with edible gold powder and doing this gold drip layer cake! Don’t let the outside deceive you, this cake is dark as night inside with velvety chocolate cake layered with bourbon cherry preserves (just add bourbon to anything…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake
In Harry Potter, Professor Lupin gives Harry, Hermione, and Ron chocolate after the first bizarre and harrowing encounter with dementors, and you’ve got to hand it to him, he knows how to cure a case of the willies. For any anti-chocolaters out there, apologies in advance for this post, but you’re probably not reading it anyway after seeing the gargantuan photo of an ALL CHOCOLATE cake, so, oh well. My sister and I have always loved chocolate. When we were little, we’d frequently have chocolate ice cream rings around our mouths, or would choose the flourless chocolate cake (often times the only gluten free dessert option but we’re not complaining),…
