Baking outside the box — Strawberry Chocolate Cake (from amaranth flour)

As someone who’s been baking for a few years, there comes a point when you start to question your ingredients. “What would happen if I used an extra egg here, or cut a cup of sugar there”. Most of these detours provided great follow up lessons: less sugar won’t destroy the cake, in fact it will make it more palatable. On the other hand going all out on eggs will produce a brick of egg-dough that no one wants to eat but is afraid to waste. In all my questioning I hadn’t managed to try out an alternative to wheat flour until last week.

Introducing amaranth flour. I came to learn about amaranth when searching the internet for alternatives to wheat. Nearly all the searches brought out the convenient fact that it was a healthier flour, packed with nutrients — that was good enough for me. The question remained though, would it bake a tasty cake. Almost a year after I failed to locate a local source, I found it at a nearby supermarket, beautifully packaged. Turns out there are local producers in Uganda, and with demand for healthy options from this cake loving country, I pray they remain.

While looking for a recipe, I came upon this one. It stood out because it’s the only one I found using amaranth as the main/only flour. The rest utilized tablespoons and paired them with wheat, which bore the slight concern that amaranth couldn’t hold up on its own. This was not true.

My revised recipe of the basic Amaranth Cake adds eggs, strawberry flavoring, chocolate and an extra cup of amaranth. I didn’t have yogurt or chopped nuts, though I’m sure they would have been great.

Amaranth Flour — 2 Cups sieved

Sugar — 1/2 Cup

Margarine — 113g

Baking Soda — 2 tbsp

Baking Powder — 2tbsp

Salt: 1 pinch

Strawberry Essence — 1tbsp

Chocolate spread — 3 tbsp

Eggs — 2 large ones

Milk — 1 Cup

Sieve 2 cups of amaranth with baking soda and baking powder into one bowl.

In a separate bowl, beat margarine and sugar until they turn pale. This should take 5 minutes on a stand mixer. Add a pinch of salt and let it mix again. In the meantime, grease your pan and turn on the oven to 160C or 320F.

Pour into the margarine-sugar, strawberry flavor and eggs. Mix, mix, mix, allowing the eggs to whip up and inflate. You should end up with something puffy and creamy. When you feel to the touch, make sure the sugar crystals are well dissolved into the mix. This bakes better.

Take three spoon-fulls of the creamy paste and put it in a small bowl. This will be for our chocolate part of the cake.

Add your 3 tbsp of chocolate spread to the small mix.

Add the flour in both bowls. Mix the flour in alternating rounds with milk. I put more flour and milk in the strawberry one, because it was the main cake.

Mix these separately. When they are well incorporated, scoop into your pan in a swirly marble-like design. Bake for 45 minutes.

Ta-da! These are the results. I expected it to rise higher, but it just didn’t. It kept to the brownie height as other bloggers have mentioned. Nonetheless, it baked through and through, like any normal cake.

The first taste made me miss wheat. It carried a spicy scent; and the grains didn’t wholly dissolve the way wheat does; what remained was a chewy texture. Yet a few slices more and I could appreciate all these attributes for what they truly are. On its own its a chewy-brownie-cake. I could imagine a warm square with cold vanilla ice-cream running down the middle and almonds sprinkled over. But alas, with no ice-cream, it went well with my tea for breakfast. This cake won’t let any wheat lovers down. The fact that you consume no gluten in the process makes you feel even better about eating cake.