My most favorite, favorite, favorite gluten free cakes in the world. On today's podcast, I'm gonna be sharing what I absolutely love what are my favorite bakes when I go out somewhere, if somebody is creating cakes, what I'm absolutely craving. So what's your favorite? And I realize that whilst we have a really, really wide, and I would say wide repertoire of different cakes that we have in the uk, there's certain ones that I just absolutely love that are absolutely incredible. So I, I'm gonna share a few. The first thing I'm gonna talk about is brownies and people talk about brownies and whenever we go out, you know, for a coffee and I look and I can see a gluten free option is, a gluten-free brownie. And I look at it and I think, Nah, that's not a brownie, that's a cake. I dunno if you are the same as me, but you sort of look at it. As you are in front of the counter, you move your body to the right hand side so you can peer not at the front of the brownie, but that side of the brownie. So as it's been cut, does it look like thick lucious fudge, or does it look like cake with holes in it? And if it looks like cake with holes in it, Sorry, I'm not having that. So this is, this is one of the most amazing cakes, the Brownie. Which is done wrong, so, so, so, so many times. And, and I do tend to find that brownies, really it's chocolate, sugar and butter. That's it with the tiniest sprinkling and a flour, and that's what a brownie should be. And then we can talk about how you can create that brownie to be e everything beautiful. But you look at most of those commercial brownies and the main ingredient is gonna be like a flour, a sugar. There'll be a bit of butter in there and a bit of chocolate, or possibly a chocolate equivalent. Something like, you know, a, a chocolate powder cocoa. And that's not the essence of a brownie. So, you know, tell me when I go out and I walk somewhere, please don't try and lie to me. tell me it's a brownie when it's actually. A piece of chocolate cake because that's what so much of it out there is, and I totally get about margins, about profitability, et cetera. But do you know what? Can, can you please just do your normal stuff with the high margin markup and then can you just put something on there that's, and tell me it's a real brownie. You're gonna have to pay double, triple what the other things are. But this is amazing So the brownie, and that's why baking them in the comfort of our own home is just so much better because if we have to spend. X amount of money on chocolate to make sure that that brownie tastes incredible. We can do that. And you can go out and you can go out and buy your high end chocolate. You can buy your medium chocolates or the very, very economically priced supermarket brands as well. They have chocolate that works amazingly too. I've used all of them and they're all amazing. And when you make the, you know, we need lots of eggs in them. Some people will do the vegan ones. I'm not talking about vegan ones as well, but they're, they're fat. But what we need is a ton of chocolate in there. And when you bite into that Brownie, now sit back, just shut your eyes. When you bite into that brownie, the top. Should be a little bit crumbly. It should be tiny little crispiness to it. And then as your teeth go through the brownie itself, it's almost, it feels a little bit like biting through chocolate decadence ganache. It should just feel silky smooth. Dense and I remember the first ever brownie I ever had, and I was in Canada and my uncle and his partner, we were all walking around this beautiful place over there in, in Toronto. And he mentioned, oh, Brownie. And they had a bite of this brownie and I had some as well. Oh. That's as it should be. And I've never tasted anything like that in my life. And we are talking 34 years ago. 34 years ago. I don't really think we had brownies in the UK back then. I'd never seen one. But this thing was just as you, as you bit into it top and the bottom of it. Were sort of crispy, little bit cakey, but the middle of it, it sort of just melted in the mouth. It was like a ganache. It was so fudgy. It was incredible. And most brownies that we are faced with chocolate cake and let's face it, a lot of them might be two or three weeks old. They've been sitting there with no wrapping on and they're getting pretty hard. And they're not actually that nice. So one of the bonuses in one of the courses is gonna be, how I make My Brownies. The other thing I don't do and, and there are two schools of thought of brownness. One school of thought is you have to beat, beat your eggs. I'm on the other side. I don't beat my eggs. So they're really, really light and fluffy. I just. Feed them together. So I, I just make sure that the whites and the yolks are mixed, but I don't make them fluffy. And you are in one of those two camps as to how you make your brownies. But brownies Oh my word. So when you've made them, you stick them in the, in the pan. And, and I use, I used to use a nice big glass, like roast. Tin thing that was made out of clear glass and that was incredible for brownies. Those are really good and they will give you a, a great crispness on the outside. More recently, I've been using, a 12 by 12, 12 inch by 12 inch cake tin. A big square one. And that works really well too. The one thing you've got to do is just line it with some baking paper. Once you've got your brownie mixture in there, that's when you can think, right, What do you need to put in? What would you want to put in? and some people may cut up a gluten free, friendly chocolate bar. I don't know, whatever you like that doesn't have gluten in one of those, you know, bars that you buy, you can chop them up into little bits and stick them all on the top. If you love walnuts, you can sprinkle it with walnuts over the top. I realized I actually had quite a lot of chocolate bars, dark chocolate, ginger chocolate. I had some, from that I've, I've just been bought over the year. Some beautiful dark chocolates and I thought, do you know what you. Cut. Cut them into pieces and put chunks in them as well. You can make sure that you put anything in there. You can add some cherries if you would like. If you've got some gluten free biscuits and you just want to stick some biscuits in, you can do that as well. I quite like them just plain. Of course. You know what I'm gonna say? You know what I'm gonna put in there? I'm gonna put about one tonka bean in. Everything has tonka. In gluten free Angela World and, and just bake them and you bake them until the top just starts to crack and then you take them out the oven quickly because you don't wanna over bake them. And so, so, so many times over the years, I've forgotten about them. And you take them out. And then you realize you have something that resembles one of those chocolate cakes. It tastes nicer because there's so much chocolate in it, but it, it just doesn't have the texture. So thi this is where you can tell how good a brownie is. Has it been just baked or is it been over baked? Is it a chocolate cake or is it a brownie? Have they put tons of chocolate in it or. Is it, are they a little bit light on the, the chocolate front? So there's all these different things that go into brownies and I know, like I said, I know there's lots for types. You know, you may be not having dairy, et cetera, but these are the gluten free brownies that I just love and whenever I make them, people absolutely love them. My husband doesn't like chocolate cake, but he will eat my chocolate brownies if there's toka in. He will also eat one of my chocolate cakes if I put Toka in it. So I think he, he loves Tonka. What else do I do? Millionaire's shortbread. Now I make this millionaire's shortbread, but it's a little bit different. And this is one that I'll have to, I'll have to see if I can if I can do a little bit of a course at some point with a few of these. But what I absolutely love about Millionaire short breads is, The shortbread layer is not just pure sugar, and that's something that I hate. So whenever somebody says to me, Oh, would you like a millionaire's shortbread? I normally run, run to the hills. I really do. I run away from them because when I eat caramel, the biggest hit taste wise should be that creaminess, that butteriness. That amazing depth of caramel, that's what I should taste. But in all of these things, what I actually taste is just sugar that's turned to a brown color. And I dunno if you all the same as me, but I am just so disappointed with these things. So what I did quite some time ago, actually, I realized that there was too much pure sugar. In a lot of those condensed tins. So I switched it and I actually use a very small tin of coconut condensed milk Yeah. And it's a little. But my word, the difference in taste from going from something, which is certainly has been a new case of market. I think it's been around the world for years and years and years, but there is so much sugar in them now. There really is, and and, and I don't know whether it's just that I've got older, but sugar just tastes more intense now. But when you actually replace that and switch it for a coconut, oh my word, the difference, suddenly you're getting a real hits of caramel. What you're not getting is that horrible taste of just sugar. And then so I make my shortbread and I, and I will, because this took so long to perfect. It really did. It took so, so. So I've got a shortbread base which has crystals of salt. You can't have shortbread without salt, can you? Whenever we buy shortbread, when we used to eat gluten, it, there was a sweetness and there was a saltiness, and you could sort of taste the, the grain of sugar and the grain of salt, and that's what we have to get with our shortbread. So I make the shortbread. Again, in a, I think I use a 10 inch square tin for this one, and then I make the caramel, which I use the coconut over the top. Honestly, the difference in taste and flavor is just amazing. And then on top of that, I do put salt flakes. Now I also put tonka flakes in, you can put whatever you like in. You know, if you wanted to put Coco nibs in, you could do that. You could sprinkle tiny little bits of something. If you like a certain flavor, put them in. They're absolutely fine. And then once that started to cool, I just start to I use a lovely chocolate, I love milk chocolate on top. Okay, that's me.. I like it. I've used some of the cheaper ones. I've used some of the more expensive ones as well. Chocolate, whatever. Chocolate you like to eat please, put it on top of your millionaire shortbread cuz this is your, your decadent delight. And then I put that on top so I just, I just like heat it on top of a bain marie. And then I take it off and just make sure that it's, it's cool to the touch. And then I just allow it to go over the top. Now, if some people may love like the taste of orange in it, and if that's the case, you, you could get some rehydrated, little bits of, of orange. You could get some bits of raspberry if that's what you are wanting. But for me, I just love shortbread. Beautiful, beautiful, buttery and creamy, caramel, middle, and then a beautiful chocolate on top and just leave it cool. And honestly, these things do you know what, when when you go to a a supermarket and you buy something off the shelf, when you actually look at that shelf life, things have got six months to a year shelf life and. I know, I know really good homemade stuff, like lasts some time, but what's in it to enable it to last for that long? But when I have these ma made, these, they don't last that long. They really don't last that long at all, But they will last two or three weeks, easily. I dunno if they'll last any more than that because they've never, ever, ever been in the house for, for that long and. Again, millionaire's shortbreads, but just not those sugar hit things that we have to eat. And I know it's a real challenge about profit margin and goods, but Come on guys, come on out there. Supermarkets, like a lot of these independent places could make much, much better quality things. And if not, you know what I. I just make them myself at home. I go to a coffee shop, I look and I think not eating that. And I will actually eat my own thing. Sometimes I'll buy one of theirs, but I, I will take something out of my bag. And the thing about Brownies about the millionaire shortbreads. They're easy, easy, easy to transport. And you know what? If anybody else is sitting around the table, if you cut a little bit off for them of yours, they'll say, Oh my word. Get me the recipe. So those are my favorite tray bakes. When we talk, when we talk about cakes, one of my favorite, favorite, favorite cakes of all time is I love rhubarb, and I've got two rhubarb cakes. Can you believe it? I've got a rhubarb cake that I I make with cardomom and ginger, and the cake is quite an intense. Beautiful cake. I make it in a bundt tin, and then I cut that bundt in half when it comes out and I pipe in a cardmom cream. So I whip cream. Sometimes I make a, a mock cream that they used to have in the, they start to make in the second World war. And and again, that's another recipe I, I, I can share at some. But you'd just put card A in it and a little bit of ice and sugar and Oh, wow. Rhubarb, cardamom, ginger, all of these other, like cinnamons throughout the cake. It's incredible. So I love that one that I make. Absolutely love it. And then a couple of years ago, I, I perfected another one, which is, oh my word, rhubarb and custard cake. And I dunno if you know this little story about about birds. You know, the, the, the powder custard that of custard mix that was actually created by the owner, Mr. Birds, shall we call him, for his wife who couldn't tolerate dairy. So he created. Birds Custard powder so that she could have custard, which I think is great. And you, you can mix it however you want, can't you? You can, you can put your jersey milk with it. You can put you know, a dairy equivalent with it. You can do whatever you want to make your own Custard. And the, the beauty of it is, is you can make it as thick for filling a cake as you would like or as thin. As you would like also just think of the things that you can make, like the floating islands. You a, those, it's like a bed of, of custard. You won't really use birds. You, you'd, you'd make your uncosted, but if you, you know, if you had some leftover, you had some meringues around, you could stick some meringues on top of that. Oh my word. Absolutely love it. Although the floating islands do tend to be poached meringue. I prefer a crispy meringue. That's just me. But there's nothing like custard with things. So I just had this idea of creating a cake and really nice, thick, chunky pieces of pink rhubarb. If you can get it and you just put them into the cake, there's no need to cook them before because it's gonna cook within that cake. The little trick. There's a few little tricks, but you know, just how you coat those pieces of rhubarb, you stick them in your vanilla cake. You then have this beautiful vanilla cake that is flavored with custard powder within it anyway, And then you put this beautiful filling, which is thick custard, and then I put a beautiful rhubarb gel through it as well. It's just out this world. So I love rhubarb. Absolutely love it. That is one cake where I don't have ginger with Rhubarb. But it's lovely with vanilla and there isn't actually toka in that cake either. What else do I love? I I, I am not a fan of coffee and walnut cake because I just find it's a sugar. But if you've listened to my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, and that is now my coffee and walnut cake, because to me it's much better than coffee and walnut cake. So that's what I have. So I, I really love miso, and I'm waiting for my, we've had a little bit of a a postal strike in the uk so I'm still waiting for my miso. I've not been able to make another miso cake this week, but now. Chocolate cake. Let me tell you about chocolate cake. Chocolate cake has to be light lucious, intense. It has to have a deep, deep, deep chocolate taste to it, and it shouldn't be sweet. That to me is the perfect chocolate cake. And I do have, I have to say Angela Hartnetts chocolate cake that is in her latest book. Oh my word, that one, even gave mine run for its money. I, I converted it to gluten free. But whoa, that recipe is incredible. I do have my own as well my chocolate cake, which is absolutely incredible. But when it comes to covering a chocolate cake for me, there's only one thing to cover it with, and that's a mixture of chocolate and cream. It's thick ganache, and that's what I put over the top. And I just make this ganache, and it always amazes me. When you make ganache, you think that you just have these two things that don't go together, and then you start to stir. And then it starts to look as if it's splitting, but then it starts to come together and you see the swirl of the dark chocolate, and suddenly you just have ganache and you leave that to just cool a little bit more. And then you can put that in between each of the layers. You can put some cherries in there if you want, but for me, just chocolate ganache, maybe a bit of Tonka, you know. And the cake is all it needs. And sometimes simplicity is what creates an absolute masterpiece. So sometimes, yeah, we enjoy putting all of these different flavors together, these concoctions together, but for me, chocolate, I love the dark cnocolate. I'd never use a hundred percent. Honestly, if you want to go and try a hundred percent chocolate, go ahead and try it. It won't be like anything else you've ever tasted before. It's, it's, it's rather a unique taste. But is it 52 to 74%? I tend to use a combination of those two. When I'm using my when I'm making a great cake and it's. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. And the other thing that I, I love creating, So we talked a little bit about, about cakes and I'm not one for glace cherries at all. If I'm using cherries, it tends to be frozen or you know, I, I love sour cherries. Cherry an almond. I like put cherry, sour cherry and almond in a cake. I do do a bundt cake like that, and that's pretty damn good. It really is. But it's the sour cherries I like. And the one thing I, I will tell you this so that you embrace it for your own baking to make great gluten free cakes. They need to be, They need to have a little bit more moisture in it than the wheat cakes. So when you start to do these cakes with fruit, especially like fresh fruit in them, the likelihood is is that it will go to the bottom of the cake. And if that happens, really do not worry about it. It's just something that happens. You can make sure that that batter, that cake batter is much like firmer. It's not gonna taste as nice, so really don't worry about it. Just enjoy it. One cake that everybody else goes mad for of mine is my lemontastic drizzle cake. And that's because I use more lemons than I think anyone else in the world. In my lemon cakes, and everyone loves it. It's, it's more like if you're from up north, this is a word that you'll know, Kali. It's more like a lemon Kali. And if you're, if you are not from off north, Yorkshire way. Then it's sherbert like a lemon sherbert, and that that's what you want on your lemon drizzle cake. So the number of times I have lemon cakes and I just think, oh, it's just a, a hint of lemon in that rather than mine. So I, I do know people go on about my lemon cake. It, it's nice and it's, it's even better with custard on. Do you know what? I just wanna tell you a little story. That almost made me cry one day and, and somebody had actually bought one of my cakes and was just sampling it as they were gonna buy it. And, and this person said, Oh wow, it's got real lemon in it. Look. And because I always have really long bits of lemon peel in. The zest and I suddenly realized that so many people only ever have lemon cake that's got a, you know, a fake lemon in it. And it really hit me. And, and I then started to look at lemon cakes as I went out around and about, and I suddenly realized how few lemon cakes have got the lemon on top. And I thought, what are we doing? You know, what are we doing with our, with the products that we buy? And I suddenly realized how proud I was that, you know, when people get lemon cakes off me, et cetera, or if I bake them for people, everything going into that cake, is natural doesn't come out of a, a plastic squeezy thing. You know, it's, it's not an equivalent that's been sitting in a little pot. That's a concentrate. It is fresh lemon and, and I dunno about you, but if you find fresh lemons and you then start to peel some of that zest off, the freshness that hits you, the whole room will be scented with this beautiful, fresh summery. Fragrance. and then when you smell a concentrate, it's nothing like that. So this person was just so excited. It's really weird, you know, when, when I used to make the, the, in like square tins and I'd cut it up into lots of pieces and certain people said, Can I have the corner pieces please? Because a small lemon And they were so, there was so much lemon that they were so most you could. Oh wow. But some people absolutely loved that. And do you know what? The corner pieces on my lemontastic dri drizzle were always the first cakes to go. And sometimes I would have somebody come and say, can have four pieces and all four corners. Of course you can. So anyway, this is. This is another cake that I absolutely love. My, my Lemon. And I also make pretty amazing genoa cake. And if you've never made a genoa cake before, you know, we have fruit cakes et cetera, but I think the secret to a Genoa cake is just so much fruit in it, including, including, including tinned, pineapple. And that puts a, an amount of moisture in there. And something that I realized that makes again this cake a little bit different is because I actually use proper when we talk about using like lemon peel, orange peel in cakes so many have those tiny little bits that are chopped up and I'd sourced. These big pieces of lemon peel, orange peel, lime peel, et cetera. And I used to cut them up and they have a totally different taste and you can do these yourself as well. I suddenly realized why, why is it that I'm not actually candying the peel that I have? So that's something else I'm gonna start doing as well. But it is quite incredible the difference when you have a Genoa cake. I am not a fruit cake. lover. I only have fruit cake to go with my cheese. That's the only reason I have a fruit cake. But this Genoa cake I had a piece and I thought, why have I not been eating this? It's lovely. So that's another cake. I tell you something I really, really love and maybe we should do a whole thing on pies, another podcast. There's nothing like a lemon meringue pie is there. But what I will say is you have to make that lemon filling yourself. And the only thing I can say is whatever a recipe says you need twice, is twice the amount of lemon in it, at least twice the amount of lemon. And then you will get the lemon kick like nothing else. And finally, what is the thing that I make more than anything else are coconut tarts, And these are, it's pastry on the bottom. It's a layer of jam. And at the moment I'm using dams and jam. I was using strawberry Jam through the summer, but my strawberry jam is now ended so we're using dams and jam, which is fine. And then what you do, it's a mix of coconut egg monitor, or butter and sugar on top, and it makes this beautiful. Almost toffee ish coconut topping on top of this little tart. It's amazing. And whenever you've got a few left, the best thing to do is to heat them up in the oven, So nice and warm. And then you put a little bit of custard on top. Oh, this is the end. To a Sunday dinner. You know when you have beautiful Sunday lunch people coming round, and you just want something so comforting to eat afterwards. This is the one thing that I recommend. However, if you get this recipe off me, you have to promise me something. You have to promise that if you want these for dessert, you're gonna have to make two or three timesthe amount. One of my best friends, bless her, I took a tin of these down and they couldn't believe it. They were so amazing that they ate the lot of them. So she's made these batches herself. Well, there's never only left to go with pudding because they're so good, they just eat them all. So you have to make more than you think you need. I promise you, if you want to be eating them hot with custard because they're so good, then we'll just go. So I love the Coconut tarts. Coconut cake. Do you know what I can't. Coconut cake, a slice coconut cake, but it's got to have butter on the side of it. That's just how I eat it. And the one thing with coconut is all desiccated coconuts are different and absorb a different amount of mix the moisture in the mixture. So it's quite difficult to make the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful coconut cakes if you buy different types of dessicated coconut. So that's just a little bit of a tip for you. So just be careful. The better always has to be a little bit needs a little bit more moisture and help. If not, you'll end up with a dry cake. So those are some of my favorite cakes. Is there anything else that I, I really enjoy? I think one thing that I used to love doing, I haven't made it for a little while, it's just doing the most magnificent. The most magnificent vanilla cake and put that in a bundt. Be really, really careful when you are using bundt cases because all of these, you know, the spray release things, be really careful cuz a lot of them, I know they're used to have wheat in so just be careful, please. So what I tend to do is I just put a little bit of oil in and then put sugar. Don't put flowering cuz it goes funny color. But just put like a caster sugar in. And it should be fine. And the one thing it, you can either use the silicon ones, which are easy released or with bundt tins, the more you spend on them, the better they are for releasing the cake. So anyway, I used to make just a plain vanilla cake. And then when you turn it out, if you put that on a big board, a big wooden board, and then you will have a beautiful punnet of something like strawberries or cherries or something else, and you will have a beautiful amount of cream on my word. That is amazing for being for an amazing presentation after your Christmas lunch. There's nothing easier. So just a plain, plain, plain, plain vanilla cake is all you need and it looks magnificent. I don't actually put icing sugar on the top, I leave it because I put a little bit of gold glitter on top of all of my cakes. So you can always see if it's one of my cakes, my brownieswill have gold glitter on my the vanilla cake will have gold glitter on certain cakes do not look good with gold, so that's when I change to a baby pink glitter on top. Just check with the glitters, but just about all of them on the market are gluten free and it's spectacular. And I will actually find some of the pictures of some of these cakes so you can have a look. And I hope that during this last, well in this podcast, I've started making you think about what you want to create next week, this week, or even today. I know that in my course that I've. I, I do make some incredible cakes. I'll make a PIMMs cake. I do a chili and chocolate cake. I do a blueberry and lime cake. I love all of these. I absolutely love all of these. And I have to say that the pims O'Clock cake. It tastes like Pimms. It looks like Pimms. It's amazing. And the chocolate cake is just out of this world, but sometimes the simple. Cake that you can just make and turn out is just out of this world and everyone needs a great vanilla cake. All you do with that is you fill it, you top it, and you sit back and enjoy. So tell me what your favorite cakes are. Do you love rhubarb cake as much as me? I don't know, but I absolutely love rhubarb cake, and I've told you that I have two absolute favorites. So anyway, this was, This week's podcast just talking, talking about cake and what our favorite cakes are. And next time you go out for a brownie, or rather, if you are considering buying a brownie, I wanna know if you put your head to the right hand side, look at the side of that brownie to say, Hey, does that look like for fudge that just look like chocolate cake and tell me, let me know, you decided not to buy it. Or if you bought it, and if you are, impressed. Do you know what there are? There are certain places that I go to or have gone to where they make their own cakes. And do you know what you can tell in a nanosecond when you walk in? Because as you look at that cake, you can see the pockets, the air pockets that are moist. And as you allow. That fork or spoon to cut through it. It's as if you can hear those magical little little billowing bits in the cake just popping as your spoon os your fork goes through. Those little bubbles are just incredible. And there is a moistness with a homemade cake that you can't get with anything else because it is fresh, because those ingredients are what should be in a cake, and there's nothing there trying to extend the shelf life. There's nothing there trying to make it something that it isn't. All the ingredients that should be in there are in. And when I go to those cafes or those restaurants where a home made cake is there, you can tell, and as you sit that first mouthful, you realize, Wow, there's a chef here, there's an employee here. There's a friend here who creates these beautiful masterpieces for us, gluten free people. And it's out of this world, and I thank every single cafe or restaurant who have home made hand made cakes for us. This is Angela from Gluten Free, Angela, and I look forward to speaking with you next week. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and let me know what you bake this week. You take care. See you soon. Bye.