What Remains When You Remove Gluten, Dairy, Nuts, Eggs, Soy, and Cane Sugar from a Cake?

When a birthday occurs, everyone has to have some kind of cake...even something cake-like will do!

My friend, Erica, and I celebrated our birthdays together on the weekend and tackled my first ever cake and our first ever cake minus most of the main ingredients...

From the Go Dairy Free website, we took the Fudge Pudding Cake recipe and made many substitutions.  The outcome?  Well...it was gooey...people had to hover over the plate to eat their cake as it truly wasn't "passable" on a napkin.  All in all though, can you really go wrong with a mixture including maple and cocoa?  I don't personally think so, but then again, our interest in this cake could have been purely a feeling of being pleasantly surprised!  The cake was gone within minutes (again, out of intrigue more than anything) and no one was sick due to it ... I call it a success!  The recipe is written below, along with my opinions for future cakes with this recipe...

Ingredients 
- 1 cup of rice flour (when I make this in the future for anyone without a gluten intolerance, I will use the called for 1 cup of flour.  We learned after wards that we were supposed to add something to the rice flour..oops!)
- 3/4 cup of maple syrup, 3/4 cup of maple sugar (this was in place of the called for 1 1/2 cup of sugar, divided).  We added the maple syrup in the cake mixture before realizing that we had the maple sugar.  In the future, I would either use all maple sugar, or would at least use the sugar in the cake and the syrup on top of the cake).
- 1/4 tsp of baking soda (not called for in the recipe, but encouraged to use when substituting maple syrup for sugar)
- 2 tsp of baking powder
- 6 tbsp of cocoa powder
- 1/2 cup of rice milk
- 1/2 tsp of salt
- 1 tsp of vanilla extract
- 2 tbsp of oil
- 1 1/4 cup of hot water (instead of the called for 1 3/4 cup of hot water)

Directions:
In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and 2 tbsp of the cocoa.  Then, we stirred in the syrup, milk, vanilla, and oil until it was all smooth.  Obviously, this step would change if we used dry sugar in the cake mixture, rather than the syrup.  Next, we poured the mixture into a 8inch square cake pan (it did NOT look right, but we continued to go with it...)

In a small bowl, mix the remaining sugar with 1/4 cup of cocoa.  Sprinkle this mixture over the batter in the pan.  Then, we gently drizzled the hot water on top. It looks weird, but go with it...don't mix it in.

We baked the cake in a preheated oven on 350 degrees for 40 minutes.  We reheated it later before eating it... Again, it didn't "look" the greatest, but what could we expect?  At least it was edible and completely fixed my chocolate cravings!

Thanks to Erica for her baking knowledge...