I love cake. Like, I looooove cake. But I’m also a bit picky about cake and can be rather critical about textures, flavors, and especially icing. Look, I’m not a professional, but I know what I want out of a cake. So when I saw the pictures of the Chocolate Cake with Darleen’s Healthy Buttercream in Gwyneth Paltrow’s book, It’s All Good, I got extremely excited. This cake had what I love. I just knew it. Plus, I’m a sucker for chocolate cake with white icing.
So, off we went to Whole Foods to grab the ingredients I needed to make this delicious, and dare I say, healthy, cake that’s vegan (don’t worry, carnivores – you can’t tell) and also Gwyneth Approved. First of all, I’m going to say, yes, you probably need to go to Whole Foods (or something similar) to find all of these ingredients. Mayyyybe not, but the odds of these things being at any and every grocery store out there are slim. Don’t live close enough to a Whole Foods? No worries! You can order most of the ingredients on Amazon!
Now, y’all, there’s a reason I refer to this as the most delicious AND most expensive cake I’ve ever made. I had to buy about $70 worth of ingredients that I didn’t already have in my pantry. Yes. $70. And I’m thinking you could make 2-3 cakes out of all of the ingredients. BUT. Its soooo damn tasty, I still recommend it. So, don’t cut corners. Buy exactly what the recipe calls for, and you will end up with a rich, moist chocolate cake with super creamy icing that’s really not bad for you at all. Should you eat it every single day? Probably not. But it’s certainly “healthy” as far as most cakes go.
The cake part is essentially brownies, and the batter truly does taste delicious like any traditional brownies batter does. The icing, which is called, Darleen’s Healthy Buttercream, after pastry chef, Darleen Gross, is seriously some of the best icing I’ve ever had in my entire life. There are just 4 ingredients – Spectrum organic shortening, tapioca starch, agave nectar and vanilla extract. So. Damn. Good.
If you’re hoping for a tall, beautiful display, then I would recommend making a double batch of both the cake and the icing and stacking 4 layers with plenty of icing in between each. My version wasn’t as lovely as the one in the book, but my husband, 2 kids and I devoured this cake in 24 hours. Picture perfect or not, this cake is amazing.
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Kind Kiddo 