Gluten and Dairy Free Almond Cake!

Hey! Someone had a birthday! It was my mom and, as the title of this post may lead you to believe, she can not have gluten or dairy. While a little more difficult, it's not impossible. In fact, I love baking for my mom because it gives me a challenge.

So I made an almond flavored cake with coffee flavored buttercream. Mmmmm. Delicious. I mixed the gluten free flour myself and it contained white rice flour, millet flour, tapioca flour, almond meal, and flax seed. I found the mixture recipe in a vegan cookie book I own. It worked very well as a cake flour. The cake itself was very delicate but I think that had to do more with the fact that there were no eggs in the cake. Mom can't eat eggs, either. 

Instead of eggs I used a combination of applesauce and baking powder. It works well enough, and makes it very moist, but does anyone have any other suggestions? I know that vegan egg substitutions are mixtures of starches but I'm not sure which ones and what the ratios are... help a girl out?

Coffee is not my favorite flavor, which surprises people because I'm a barista, but this frosting was amazing. I brewed some ridiculously strong instant coffee and used it for the liquid content of the buttercream. Seriously, this coffee smelt burnt and was undoubtedly disgusting but combined with enough sugar all was well. It's one of my favorite frosting flavors I've ever made.
As for the piping pattern I just thought it might be a fun challenge (it was) and something my mom would like (she did.) I wish the pictures were better but they were not taken with my camera so it's hard to see some of it. It's not perfect but I'm very happy with the colors, although I was having a little trouble with Wilton colors not blending well with the vegan buttercream. I've heard that Wilton does that with real buttercream too sometimes so I may start replacing my colors with other brands as they run out.

Oh, and see the cursive up there? I've never done much cursive piping before so I gave it a try. It's good to know and now that I'm decorating cakes for work I should learn how to do it right? What you see in the pictures was probably my 5th try. I had to wipe away buttercream so many times. But I got it eventually. At least enough to be legible. That has to count for something.

xoxo
Stephanie