My commitment is to bake two new creations per week. Being someone who responds well to schedules and goals that can be neatly checked off on a list, I obviously planned a second baked good for last week: coffee cake. I scoured recipe books for inspiration and wrote out my own version. I substituted canola oil for the butter (a poor girl’s coconut oil). I created a crumb topping with espresso powder, almond meal, and more canola oil. It was crumbly and sweet, and that’s where I should have stopped.
The tricky part, for me at least, when it comes to gluten- and dairy-free baking is that one slight mis-substitution can throw the whole thing off. Patience is key—testing one substitution at a time to preserve the texture and flavor of the original dish is essential. Patience, unfortunately, isn’t one of my strong suits.
I got excited. My crumb topping tasted so crumbly-coffee-delicious that I got ambitious—why use an egg when I had some applesauce in the fridge that I could sub it out for? That would make the cake vegan. Why use half garbanzo flour and half regular when I could use all garbanzo? (Forget the whole idea about gradually experimenting with it to preserve the texture.) Then I’d have a gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan cake. I tossed in applesauce, agave nectar, garbanzo flour, vanilla, and—hey, why not—some chopped up chocolate for good measure.
Well, what I came out with, despite prolonging the cooking time by 15 minutes (jiggly when poked), and then 15 more minutes (still jiggly when poked), so closely resembled the original dough (albeit with some hardened, brown edges) that I was able to mix it around the pan like it was dough when I finally gave up and took it out.
So, while there was no second recipe posting this week, it’s not for lack of planning or trying. The dough, however, is resting and waiting in a plastic container in my freezer. It will make a reappearance in a crust or crumb topping sometime very soon.
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