This is why I don’t bake cakes. Or at least not regularly. Mostly only when asked. 

My friend Ari asked. They sent me a link to a gorgeous lavender blackberry cake from Sally’s Baking Addiction and asked if it was at all possible to make a gluten-free version for their birthday. I’ve made gluten free cakes and desserts for Ari before, so of course I accepted the challenge. Y’all, hubris is apparently a renewable resource. I decided not to use my usual, tried-and-true gluten free recipe and instead decided to adapt Sally’s recipe. First mistake. I decided to leave out the cream cheese from the frosting because I know Ari doesn’t like cream cheese. Second and third mistakes: flavor and structure took a hit.  

Welcome to the inaugural Kitchen Disasters post here on KaraCooks. Settle in because this one is a ride. 

The Baking

My standard gluten-free baking uses King Arthur’s “Measure for Measure” flour. It’s a fantastic product: a mixture of rice flours, potato starch, sorghum flour, tapioca flour, and the xanthan gum necessary to create the gluten-like structure in baked goods. I’ve used it in their recipes and variations of their recipes and never had a problem. 

This time it didn’t work. Specifically it didn’t work because Sally’s recipe uses a reverse creaming method that works great with regular flour but absolutely does NOT work when you coat gluten-free flour with fat first and then add the wet ingredients. It makes for a dense, sandy textured cake that doesn’t rise as well as it should. (Note for folks who want to know exactly why: The reverse creaming technique creams the butter, adds the flour, and then finally adds the liquid ingredients. The flour particles get coated in fat before any liquid hits. In a wheat cake, that tenderizes beautifully but it absolutely smothers gluten-free blends that need every chance they can get to develop structure before blending in the fat.) 

My cakes came out of the oven shorter and denser than expected. I knew it right away, but by then it was Saturday evening, the party was Sunday, and there was no version of this where I had time (or energy) to start over. So I soldiered on: I brushed the cakes with lavender simple syrup, wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge to chill overnight. I kept my fingers crossed that the syrup soak would maybe help with the texture. I also made the buttercream and put it in the fridge overnight so I’d be ready to go the next morning.  

Sunday morning I unwrapped the cake and I could feel it in my hands: dense, heavy cake. It didn’t feel like it would be gummy, but it was definitely not a light-and-fluffy cake. It was a cake that was going to slice beautifully and then sit heavy on the fork. I persevered. I crumb coated the first layer, added a piped border to create a “moat” for the filling (if you’re using a runny filling this is the move), poured in the blackberry jam, added the next layer, and finished the crumb coat. So far so good. Everything was working exactly as it should. While the preliminary frosting coat was chilling in the fridge, I smashed a couple of blackberries through a fine sieve and let the juice drip into the remaining buttercream. Ultimately it took 3 of them to get the color I wanted and I wound up with a gorgeous pale violet wash. That was the final frosting coat. And just because I like to live life on the edge, I pulled out my limited piping tools and piped stars around the edges and in the center of the cake. 

The piping did not come out exactly the way I wanted. I am not a cake decorator and have never claimed to be. The frosting and piping is, generously, rustic. 

The jam, on the other hand, was perfect. I used Bonne Maman blackberry preserves. There was just enough tartness to push back against the sweet of the American buttercream, which is exactly the job the filling needs to do in a cake this sweet. If you ever find yourself making a blackberry-anything dessert and you don’t have the time or the berries to make jam from scratch, Bonne Maman is the right call. 

I chilled it again while I was getting myself ready for the party and then right before leaving I arranged plump, fresh blackberries around the top and in a cluster in the center. I had originally planned to sugar some of the berries, but I ran out of time, so that’s for a future cake. Honestly, I’m proud of this cake. Was the frosting rustic? Yes. Was it a little lopsided? For sure. But it was cake and it looked birthday-celebratory, so I moved on. 

The Car Ride

Y’all, I should not have moved on so confidently.

It’s May in Georgia. Not August-hot yet, but warm enough. And even warmer in a car that’s been sitting in the driveway all morning. I started the car and turned on the a/c and let it run for 20 mins before I loaded in the cake. It wasn’t enough. By the time I got halfway to the park, the moats melted in the car. By the time I got to the park, the buttercream had given up on holding anything together. The jam was coming out the sides of the cake, the structural integrity was officially a memory, and we had to wedge paper plates under the cake plate to keep blackberry jam from running out onto the picnic table.

You can actually see it in the cross section photo: the left side of the cross-section is the most visible part where the moat surrendered.

It was a hot mess. A real one. Not a metaphorical one.

The Verdict

Here’s the thing, though: it was a delicious hot mess.

The crumb was dense but pleasant; not as fluffy as the other gluten-free cakes I’ve made, but not nearly as bad as I’d worked myself up to expect. The lavender syrup soak did its job well.

The jam was the star. Tart, not overly sweet, doing exactly the work a filling should do in a layer cake that’s already sweet from the buttercream. The fresh blackberries on top were huge and juicy and gorgeous and people grabbed them off the cake before they grabbed their slices.

The lavender didn’t come through. Everyone agreed; the consensus around the picnic table was that you couldn’t really taste it, even if you took a bite of cake without the jam. The recipe needed more aggressive lavender than I gave it, which is not something I thought I’d ever have to say about a lavender cake. I’d steeped the syrup carefully, infused the milk, used what felt like a reasonable amount of culinary lavender. Turns out reasonable was not enough. Next time: doubled. Maybe more.

And the buttercream was too sweet. This is where Sally was right and I was wrong, and it took me a whole cake to figure out why.

I assumed Sally chose cream cheese as a flavor call to give the frosting tang. But Sally chose cream cheese for at least two reasons, and the one I missed was the structural one. Cream cheese cuts the sweetness in a way that lets the lavender and blackberry actually come through, but just as crucially: cream cheese makes buttercream more stable. American buttercream, without that tang, is just sugar and butter, and on a warm Sunday afternoon in Alpharetta in May it just doesn’t hold up. 

The alternate suggestion, floated around the picnic table by people who were eating the hot mess with their fingers at that point: goat cheese. Tangy without being cream-cheese-flavored, which would honor Ari’s preference. Add a little lemon zest because lemon plays well with both lavender and blackberry. The goat cheese gives you the structure and the tang. The lemon gives you the brightness. The frosting actually has a chance of staying on the cake when you take it out of the air conditioning.

The Cupcake Plan

Standing around that picnic table looking at the cake that had melted into itself, we started designing the next version, which is going to be cupcakes. Hollow out the centers. Pipe the Bonne Maman blackberry preserves into the wells. Frost with blackberry-tinted goat cheese buttercream with a little lemon zest. Top each one with a fresh blackberry.

Cupcakes solve the structural problem. No layers to be uneven, no moats to melt, no jam running out the sides because the jam is inside the cupcake where it belongs. Cupcakes also solve the transport problem; you can chill them right up until you walk out the door, and they don’t fall apart on the way to the park.

I’m going to try it. I’ll let y’all know.

In the meanwhile I’m tagging this one a Redeemed Disaster and leaving y’all with the version of this cake I know works, because I’ve made it before and I should have made it this time too.

Or Just Make Cupcakes

Bake gluten-free cupcakes from the same batter. Cool completely. Use a teaspoon or an apple corer to remove a small well from the center of each one. Fill the well with Bonne Maman blackberry preserves. Frost with goat cheese buttercream tinted pale violet. Top with one fresh blackberry.

You’re welcome. I’m going to be making these.

P.S. The cake was lopsided. The frosting was, generously, rustic. The moats melted. We’re calling it character.

P.P.S. Aldin makes and decorates cakes professionally. I expect he’ll have words on Monday when I see him.

P.P.P.S. The Bonne Maman jam, though. Hold onto that.