Gluten Freebird

My inner 5-year-old freaked out last year when I realized that I couldn’t have a normal, store-bought birthday cake. I knew that there would be plenty of gluten-free cakes, but would they be suitable for my birthday? Let’s just say that the once-a-year issue of birthday cake led to more panics than losing beer, pasta, pizza, or anything else that I’d eaten on a daily basis.

So, let’s take a tour of the many opportunities this year to test the options (store-bought and homemade) available to the gluten-free.

Hint: My inner kid has a party hat on.

For this, my second gluten-free birthday, I outsourced the job, asking genius Josh Short at Buzz Bakery to design my cake. I gave him free license to bake whatever came to him with fingers crossed that I would get a real cake. Seriously, all I wanted was something good enough to eat as breakfast leftovers in following days. Home run. Short made me a gluten-free chocolate cake filled with Illy espresso buttercream and English toffee encased with chocolate buttercream. It looked and tasted like the ultimate cake. The toffee bits in the filling added a good crunch. Short works a lot with almond flour, creating brownies, cupcakes, and custom cakes to suit gluten-avoiders, so he knows the drill.

Onto my other experiences with birthday cakes: For my first birthday sans gluten, Gluteneer made me a romantic dinner at home. The grand finale was a decadent chocolate layer cake with peanut butter frosting. (To qualify as a birthday cake in the Gluten Freebird world, chocolate is usually required.) This cake was adapted from a Boston Globe recipe. He used a mix of rice and sorghum flours, which created a dense and delicious cake. [Sidenote: We've found that, in GF baking, chocolate cakes work better than white cakes because the chocolate adds texture to the batter and masks the flavor of the alternative flours.] I was swiping pb frosting with my finger for nearly a week.

For his birthday, I hauled out 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes and made a Boston cream pie.  The book is a bible for preparing different baked goods. The recipes rely on a few variations of all-purpose baking flour mixes (usually using sorghum and tapioca). I like it for the pies, cakes, and muffins, but have yet to use it for any savory recipes. The Boston cream pie wasn’t the towering chocolate behemoth I’d require, but the New Englander enjoyed it. Custard + chocolate sauce made for two good masks to any glutenless flour flavors.

As an alternative (a good option for a special cake, but not necessarily a birthday cake), Praline Bakery in Bethesda makes a decadent gluten-free macaroon cake that I’ve been meaning to write up for months. It comes in an array of flavors, but hazelnut was my choice. Leave it to the French to concoct two desserts in one, with macaroons lining each piece. It’s a very light cake, but full of mousse with good crunch from the macaroons. It was more like art than food.

So I guess that’s like two presents in one.