Lemon Chiffon Cake

I love cake.

There, I said it.

Some of you may be partial to pies or brownies or tarts or tortes or ice cream, but I love cake. Chocolate, carrot, yellow, white, strawberry, raspberry, you name it, I love it. If it's cake and it's gluten free, I will eat it. If it's cake and it's gluten free and you leave it near me, I will eat most--if not all--of it.

It's my Achille's heel, really. If I was a Sesame Street character, I'd be the cake monster. Friendly, furry, but more than willing to run people down for a bite of angel food.

I bake a lot of cakes. Not only because we don't live anywhere near a gluten free bakery (siiiggghh...), but because I have found the best gluten free cookbook.

--photo borrowed from Amazon.com

Now, don't get me wrong - this isn't your typical make-it-from-scratch Martha Stewart-esque cookbook. But I'm not that kind of cook. I'm a cook with a more-than-full-time job as a pastor. I'm a cook who lives far from specialty stores that sell things like tapioca starch. I'm a cook-from-a-box-mix type of cook. That makes this my perfect cake cookbook.

Anne Byrn starts each recipe with a basic gluten free cake mix - either yellow or chocolate. I've used Hodgsen Mill's cake mixes, Betty Crocker's, and Pamela's, and all work quite well. Then she adds other ingredients to the mix to make it SO delicious.

Some gf cake mixes on their own can have a gritty texture because of all the rice flour they use. But with Anne's recipes and a lot of batter whipping, the cakes turn out fluffy and airy and utterly delightful. If you served them to a "normal" eater, they may not even know that they were gluten free!

A few weeks ago I mixed up Anne's Lemon Chiffon cake - a true feat as it involved making meringue, which I am not always so good at. Yet it turned out beautifully.

I won't post the recipe here (plagiarism!), but I will say that Anne Byrne's cookbook is well worth checking out if you're my kind of chef. The cakes are fast, easy, and totally yummy, and the extra ingredients are usually very easy to find.

This cake did not last long at our house!

What's your favorite kind of cake?