My kitchen life last week was pretty much consumed by the making of two birthday cakes—each made not only with a particular birthday boy or girl in mind, but also with some food-allergy considerations and real-food parameters in place. While I met with some success, I also had to make a few concessions along the way to accomplishing my goals. As always, I learned a lot through each process.

For the first cake—a Cars-themed chocolate race track for 2-year-old Keillor—I was looking to try a new recipe for a basic chocolate cake that would be gluten-, dairy- and egg-free. (Keillor doesn’t exhibit signs of an allergy to any of those ingredients, but his oldest brother, Kellen, can’t eat them, and I wanted the whole family to be able to partake.) I turned to a recipe titled Classic Chocolate Layer Cake in Cybele Pascal’s The Whole Food Allergy Cookbook. I appreciate Pascal’s omission of refined sugars (she calls for honey instead in both the cake recipe and the accompanying Chocolate Fudge Frosting and Vanilla Frosting recipes), as well as her suggestion in most instances for healthy oils (I chose to use coconut oil). The only change I made to the recipe as it was written was to use a gluten-free flour blend in place of the recipe-recommended spelt flour. (Although I have experimented with sprouted spelt flour, it does contain gluten, and Kellen still experiences stomach discomfort after eating it.) This flour substitution was undoubtedly a crucial factor in the final result, which was a cake that didn’t rise well (not surprising for a gluten-free cake without eggs), and that was dense and fudge-like instead of fluffy and, well, cake-like. It wasn’t a big enough disappointment to deter any of us from eating it, however; it disappeared almost as quickly as Keillor was able to make a wish and blow out the candles poked into its center.

For the second cake—in honor of 4-year-old Kennah—I decided to go the real-food route as much as possible and not worry so much about the food-allergy issues. (And Kellen was a good sport about sitting this one out.) This decision led me to a recipe in Janie Quinn’s Sprouted Baking for Yellow Cupcakes (which easily converted to a cake recipe). Some advance preparation was required for this cake, including sprouting enough soft white wheat to grind into flour, and draining the whey from yogurt to make a cream-cheese-like base for the frosting. I had borrowed a special baking pan from a friend to shape the cake into the skirt of a ball gown to fit a Cinderella doll. The only hitch here was ensuring that I had enough batter to fill the pan—and as it turned out, I had to double the recipe to do so. And now to confess the concessions I had to make in order to turn out my daughter’s dream cake:
• I used sugar (albeit organic and slightly less refined) in both the cake and the frosting.
• I used regular blue food coloring to tint the frosting (although I did try some alternatives first—including blueberry juice and the steeping liquid that resulted from boiling water poured over chopped red cabbage, both of which yielded a pretty pink instead of Cinderella’s trademark blue).
Of course, any misgivings I had about not quite reaching my real-food goals were pretty much assuaged by the look of total surprise and delight on Kennah’s face when we unveiled the cake and she caught her first glimpse—and by the delicious flavor and terrific texture of the cake. As I recently read—just in the nick of time, actually—on the blog of a friend who’s further along on this journey than I am, “Sometimes Real Life trumps Real Food.”

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.