Sweet Treats – Gluten-Free Raspberry Feather Cakes

It’s often where you least expect it. A trip to a supermarket aisle for gluten-free products and ideas is a dis-spiriting experience. Health food stores have lots of gluten-free produce but, if you are too shy to ask the usually helpful staff, give few clues about their uses. Local cafés might only offer one or two menu choices, including ubiquitous orange and almond cakes.

But then, without warning, you can stumble across a mother-lode of great ideas.

I came across this idea when I headed into a small shopping centre on the shores of Port Stephens in NSW for some lunch. Outside the one-supermarket, one-newsagent, one-butcher display was a set of food outlets. At first it seemed they offered the usual chips with everything but then there was a sandwich bar offering organic, gluten-free, lactose-free choices and the cake display alone was so perfectly drool-worthy I felt like doing a little dance. This being a small shopping centre, I nixed that idea fast, but the memory of that perfect raspberry cake with a nicely made cuppa has left me thinking about it for most of the last year, working out the many permutations for replicating it.

Now I have.

Makes 12

INGREDIENTS

3 eggs; ¾ cup caster sugar; 75 g almond meal (¾ cup); 40 g cornflour (¼ cup); ¼ tsp salt; 2 punnets fresh raspberries OR 200g frozen raspberries; 1 cup icing mixture (optional)

METHOD

Preheat oven to 150 °C. Line a 12 cup muffin tray with paper (not foil) liners.

Place the eggs and sugar in a medium sized bowl and beat with electric beaters for at least 15 minutes. Keep beating until the mixture is trebled in size. You should be able to lift the beaters and write your name with the mixture as it trickles back into the bowl, with the word clearly suspended across the surface of the mixture.

Sift the almond meal, cornflour and salt into the bowl then use a large metal spoon to very gently fold in the flours into the egg mixture..

Place one punnet of raspberries in a small bowl and mash them roughly with a fork. Add the raspberry mixture to the cake mixture and fold in briefly to swirl through rather than completely combine.

Spoon the mixture into the paper cups to fill them just two-thirds full. The mixture will rise as the cakes cook, so don’t be tempted to spoon in extra.

Bake for 20 minutes, then test by inserting with a skewer. Cook for a further 5 minutes if required.

Turn out the cakes immediately onto a cooling rack and leave them to cool completely.

Meanwhile, make you icing. Sift the icing sugar into a bowl. Mash the remaining punnet of raspberries into the icing mixture and add a scant teaspoon of boiling water if you want to make it runnier.

You can either spoon the icing mixture directly on top of the cakes or, as I have shown in the picture above, gently peel the paper cases off the cakes and spoon icing over the tops and sides for a gloriously pink-jewelled centrepiece for afternoon tea.

COST

$7.20 for 12 cakes