second try

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Coconut Flour Neopolitan Rose Cake with REAL Buttercream!



Do you ever wonder what to do for birthdays if your kids or other loved ones are not eating grains? Mine are off of them for an extended period while I am attempting to heal their guts with the GAPS diet. When I found this Neopolitan Rose cake by I Am Baker, I knew it was the one so I went on the prowl to come up with a real food version. (Tip number 1: watch her video tutorial. Aside from seeing how to decorate it in 10 minutes or under, I learned to double bag the icing bags to keep the tip free of being stuck at the bottom of the bag. That was a huge time saving tip right there.)


Coconut Flour Chocolate Cake:


For the chocolate layer we used this moist, delicious coconut flour recipe from Elana's Pantry Chocolate Cake with these GAPS friendly adaptions by Gaps Diet Journey. Because we had previously made it, we knew it was going to be perfect already, and it was.

Coconut Flour Pink Cake:


I colored the white cake batter in the recipe below with beet juice. It was pink before I baked it, and came out golden brown. So next time, I will be trying another natural food dye to avoid those disruptive chemicals in artificial food dyes. My first guess is to try strawberries, but who knows... once I research it, and bake it successfully, I will update this posting.

White Cake:


Elana's Pantry seems to be winning on the cakes! This one was awesome in white form or supposed to be pink form. I only altered the sweetener and the oil: honey and coconut oil instead. I wanted to use ghee, but it wasn't soft at the time.

Real, Genuine Buttercream Frosting:


I can't rave about this enough. This buttercream recipe by Modern Alternative Mama was glorious in my mouth, my guests thought it was amazing and our whole family loved it! I was concerned that it wouldn't be stiff enough for actual decorating since it wasn't comprised of 2 pounds of gross sugar which people typically use in fake butter cream. However, the photo above testifies that it held! Those heavy roses didn't slide off. It was the first time in my life I have ever tasted real buttercream, and I don't want to go back. For time's sake, I used honey as the sweetener, but somehow it didn't have that overtly honey taste. It was perfect. I made a double recipe and that was perfect for this cake. (2 pounds of butter)

I left my white icing as is, added a couple of tablespoons or so of chocolate powder for my chocolate layer and colored the pink with just a little beet juice. Although, as you can see from this image from Sustainable Echo, you can also get a hot pink color from beet juice. I don't care for beet flavor and the icing didn't have any.

Side note: Butter is not GAPS friendly. But, I wanted to decorate it with roses, it was her birthday and so I digress. 

My tips are:

Watch the tutorial from I Am Baker.
Double bag your icing bags. 
Use a 1mm tip for roses.
Pre-bake your cakes for ease of assembly the next day.
When cooled, freeze even for a short while.
Frost with a thin crumb layer and freeze for a bit to reduce crumb issues while frosting.
When it is frozen enough not to get crumby go ahead and do the roses. 
Have fun! Do this before dinner and it should be completely defrosted by dessert time.
According to Modern Alternative Mama's tips, if your frosting begins to separate cool it off quickly in the fridge (I used my freezer to save time) or reheat gently if it is too stiff and cold.
What do you think, would you try this?