good ol' betty crocker.

Good ol’ Betty Crocker. She’s always got her fingers on the pulse of what the people want. I’ve been an admirer of her gluten-free mixes for some time, now, but I’ve never had the impulse to try one. But the impulse hit last week while I was grocery shopping & I threw a mix into my cart. Who knew when I would actually have a chance to make it, though…

Meanwhile, here I am cooking a million different dishes for my annual White Elephant party. I’ve got beans soaking, meat stewing, crudités cut, dips whipped, coconut milk warmed & sweetened & cooling. And I’m wearing my red apron, the one that says “Betty Crocker” across the front. When I get to the next item on my cooking to-do list, the coconut tart with macadamia nut crust, I pull out the ingredients & say a medium-bad word when I realize I’m missing one very important ingredient: gelatin. Since time was short, I opted against fixating on the mistake and instead accepted the inspiration my apron offered. It told me to go with Betty Crocker. So I pulled that cake mix out of my cabinet and proceeded to ignore the instructions on the back of the box.

Well, not entirely. The recipe calls for water, butter and eggs, and since one of my party-goers is lactose intolerant, I got creative with a butter substitution. One-third cup applesauce and 1/4 cup Coco López (that sweet coconutty stuff you find in the liquor aisle of your grocery store; you might use it to blend up a pitcher of piña coladas) ought to do it! The cake was moist and chocolatey, and I didn’t need to make ANY excuses that it was gluten-free and dairy-free (because who really needs to know?!). I whipped up some sweetened coconut milk in my iSi cream whipper, spread that between the two 8″ layers, topped the cake off with a generous pile of more whipped coconut milk then dusted the top with unsweetened cocoa powder.

So while I can’t tout the merits of Betty’s cake mix on its own, I can say this: it behaved wonderfully and predictably despite the changes I made to the ingredients. And even better? My guests, who all know I’m GF, made a point to say, “I can’t believe it’s gluten-free!”

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