More miso caramel cake

May 25-27, 2023

   

Readers who know Michael personally or follow his other social media accounts will know how much he loves playing mixed social netball. This year he decided to celebrate his birthday by gathering his netball-playing friends for a game on a local court. I tallied scores during the game and baked a couple of cakes for afterwards. They're both miso caramel cake: one is the regular recipe decorated with licorice to resemble a netball, and the second is an adaptation that's both vegan and gluten-free. 

I stretched the preparation out over three days, so it didn't feel like an excessive amount of effort in any session. Here's how it played out:

Thursday: make a vegan, gluten-free version of the miso caramel sauce using Loco Dairy Free Thickened Creamy instead of dairy cream and Nuttelex Buttery instead of butter. I carefully checked that my usual white miso was vegan and gluten-free, too. The original recipe makes double what's needed, so I didn't alter the quantity.

Friday: bake two cakes! The first precisely as described in the original recipe, and the second using more Nuttelex Buttery as butter, Orgran No Egg instead of eggs, and a gluten-free flour mix I'll describe below.

Saturday: slather those cakes in buttercream. The first, again, as described in the original recipe, and the second using Nuttelex Buttery for butter. After refrigerating the cakes for an hour, I pulled out the regular one and decorated it with sliced strips of vegan but not gluten-free Fyna licorice.

   

To be more precise, I actually made the vegan, gluten-free bit first each day so that the kitchen and utensils were clean and least likely to get contaminated. The gluten-free flour mix, which I've included below, comes from our friend Mickey. She knows her vegan gluten-free baking and we'd sampled her own excellent birthday cake a few months earlier, so I was keen to try it for myself instead of just relying on my usual Orgran mix. I like that there's almond meal involved to head off the potential chalkiness, but not so much that the mixture seems grainy.

You can see the two cake slices side by side, above. I baked them both for 50 minutes, based on my notes from last time, and this was just right for the gluten-free cake but perhaps a touch too long for the regular cake. The gluten-free cake didn't rise as high as the regular one, and the buttercream was proportionally much thicker. I found the Nuttelex a bit greasy and overwhelming in this quantity, so I might reduce the buttercream by a quarter if I baked this again. I didn't beat the cold regular butter enough, and little light yellow flecks of it were visible in the buttercream - that's a mistake I typically make once every few years, the reminder I need not to take shortcuts.

The regular cake was snaffled up within 10 minutes of cutting, and the second cake found some extra appreciative gluten-free and vegan eaters amongst Michael's non-netballing friends at the pub later. They were a small success within a big celebration.

   

Gluten-free cake flour mix

(a recipe shared by Mickey)

310g brown rice flour

300g white rice flour

105g almond meal

175g potato starch

8g xanthan gum