… using Cherrybrook Kitchen’s GF yellow cake mix.
Thursday evening, I finally got a minute to establish a baseline for my CBK-GF yellow-cake-mix-based pumpkin roll adventure, and I am encouraged! Because Cherrybrook Kitchen has successfully created a cake mix that is both gluten free and egg free which bakes well and actually tastes good (more on that in a later post), starting with that mix seemed like the obvious place to start.
For my first experiment, this is what I did:
- CBK’s instructions call for
1/3 C melted butter
3/4 C water
the cake mix.
Preheat oven to 350*. Baking time for a 9″ round layer is 28-30 minutes.
My adjustments:
- 1/3 C melted Earth Balance Soy Free Buttery Spread
3/4 C Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin
EnerG Egg Replacer for the equivalent of 1 egg
1 CBK GF yellow cake mix
Preheat oven to 325. (I meant to preheat it to 300 but was standing at an odd angle to the dial while setting the temp. It ended up being 325. It worked anyway!) Baking time ended up being about 36-38 minutes.
I know. It’s pretty risky to replace something as runny and loose as water with something as dense and comparatively thick and unyielding as pumpkin, but I had to start somewhere.
Because of the density of the batter, I was concerned that the cake wouldn’t bake all the way through with the mix’s baking time and temp. Baking without eggs has taught me that when a recipe calls for eggs, nothing works like eggs!! And when replacing eggs, it’s important to bake low and slow. I reduced the temp and increased the time so that the inside would have more time to bake without the outside drying out and/or burning.
I was ultimately aiming for the sliced roll look with all of its layers of roll and creamy filling, if at all possible, since I wasn’t planning on being able to actually roll it up. I decided to try baking the batter in thin layers in loaf pans. The amount of batter that I ended up with after I made the above adjustments was adequate to divide three ways. While the batter did bake quite nicely, it did not move much from the position it was in when I poured it into the bread pans, so it wasn’t nice and smooth looking like ordinary cake.
After baking, the look of the batter was pretty much unchanged from when I first poured it.
It was, however, baked through and through. That was a huge victory in gluten free, egg free baking! Thank You, God!
The baked batter was also flexible and held together well. I am still amazed!! I hadn’t expected that at all!! I was pretty sure that, if anything, it was going to break apart and/or crumble at the slightest movement.
It came out of the pans cleanly, and it’s not as visible here as the full size version, but the bottom is covered with little tiny bubbles from the leavening. The roll was that way throughout.
As you can see, there were no cracks or tears or giant chunks missing from sticking to the pan. I was very pleased! I am betting that I will actually be able to roll this baby up if I am careful. Yippee!!
Because Cherrybrook Kitchen has done a great job of figuring out the leavening situation, the person baking it at home doesn’t have to worry about it. It is a load off, let me tell you! This is why I thought CBK-ycm would be a great base for this endeavor and it has really paid off so far!
I attempted to make a filling for it that would be just as good as the cream cheese filling but I put it on too soon and it melted all over the place. It tasted good, but it wasn’t pretty. Sticky, but not pretty.
It’s not beautiful, but if you look closely, you can see that it is baked all the way through. 🙂
I’m so excited! I’m hoping that this pumpkin roll/thingy will give me Favorite Aunt status for at least five minutes on Thanksgiving Day. We’ll see! 🙂 I definitely need to get working on the filling. I’ll probably post about that tomorrow.
Thanks for visiting! God bless you!
– Esther
Lemonade by the Gallon 