They say a photo is worth a thousand words. When I saw pictures of this cake I said in my characteristic way (intelligent and worthy of a well-bred lady, of course) “well, what a cool thing” and looked up the recipe. For a long time, I stopped looking for recipes in the gluten-free version because they are either completely missing, or they use mixes and other gums that do not inspire me, or you can no longer find the ingredients because of the ton of sugar used. Here I used Mrs. Gina Bradea’s recipe as inspiration, in which I replaced the butter and milk with plant based versions, reduced the amount of sugar and used rice flour, a flour that has a neutral taste, similar to wheat flour, but it is more “thirsty”, so I also reduced the amount a bit. I apologize to the lady this way for mutilating her recipe, but I like what it turned out and I hope this version will be useful for those who want to eat a good cake, but cannot use wheat flour and dairy.
Ingredients
- 5 eggs
- 100 grams of coconut butter
- 100 grams of sugar
- 120 grams of rice flour
- 100 grams of cashews
- Lemon and vanilla essence
- A pinch of salt
Method of preparation
Soak the cashew for at least 3 hours in lukewarm water, or overnight in cold water. When we start the cake, we wash it well, then weigh it and add water up to 500 grams. We blend it well until it becomes a foamy milk. We weigh the ingredients and place the bowl of weighed coconut butter in another bowl or saucepan of warm water to liquefy. If it’s summer it’s already soft. We break the eggs and put the whites in one bowl, the yolks in another. Put a pinch of salt over the yolks and mix them a little. We leave them aside and beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. I always beat the egg whites with the whisk after I had an unfortunate experience with some egg whites that I struggled with the mixer for about half an hour without any effect, and when I put the whisk in them became stiff in 3 minutes. But in the following operations we need the mixer. Put the sugar over the yolks and mix well until it melts. Do not hurry, it is important that the sugar is well melted, and that our mixture of yolk and sugar looks like a thick cream. We begin to put the coconut butter little by little, like mayonnaise, mixing constantly. After it is well incorporated, we add the cashew milk, in 2 stages, continuing to mix, this time at low speed, because otherwise the composition in the bowl jumps all over the place and we don’t want to scrape it off the walls. We put the essences and flour and give them forward with the mix. After they have also been incorporated well, we leave the mixer and continue with the spoon or spatula, because we are going to add the last ingredient, the whipped egg whites. We also put it in two stages, mixing carefully, horizontally. The composition is very liquid, but that’s how it should be.
We pour it into a pan lined with baking paper, I have my famous 26 cm diameter pan. Before I started mixing the egg yolks I started the oven, with fire up and down, at 160 degrees Celsius, so now the oven is perfectly hot and we put the pan inside. We leave it for 50 minutes without opening the oven door. We take it out of the oven and let it cool covered with a towel.
Then, so that the suspense is even greater, we put it in the refrigerator for about 2 hours and only then can we cut it with a knife that we dip in water for each cut, so that the cream does not stick to it. It looks great and tastes the same. I reduced the amount of sugar by 20% and did not sprinkle sugar on top. If you are used to the very sweet taste, you can put 125 grams of sugar instead of 100
