Gluten-Free Christmas Cake

[TylerK]

Last year due to some friends and family going gluten free I made some changes to my Christmas baking list. Most of it was a success, with the notable exception of my Christmas cake. It was a fairly standard recipe for a dark, dense fruitcake, but when I substituted in GF flour and xanthan gum for the all-purpose wheat flour I ended up with a grainy, crumbly mess which fell apart when I tried to cut it. It was tasty and moist due to a healthy soaking in scotch, but it was necessary to eat it with a spoon.

The grainy consistency, I'm hoping to get rid of just by removing the rice flour from my mix (rice flour, sorgum, millet, tapioca). What I really need help with though is to get it to properly stick together. I'm including the ingredient list below. Putting it together was pretty standard - creaming butter, eggs and sugar, soaking the dried fruit in the liquid ingredients and then combining them in parts with the dry. It was cooked at 300F until done.

Ingredient list:

1 cup dried apricots, chopped

1 cup candied pineapple, chopped

1 cup chopped dates

1 cup cup pecan halves

1 cup dried cherries

1 cup candied cherries

1 cup raisins

3 1/4 cups GF flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp xanthan gum

1 1/2 cup butter, room temperature

1 1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup molasses

1 tsp salt

6 eggs

2 tbsp grated orange zest

2 tbsp grated lemon zest

small can of crushed pineapple (with juice)

1/2 (plus more for soaking) cup scotch

Does anyone have any inside, or outside the box suggestions on how I might make the texture a little more like a non-GF fruitcake?

Thanks

[ChrisZ]

Almond meal is my go-to for gluten free cakes. It helps that I like it and prefer to bake with almond meal anyway because it's so delicious and moist, but half my family have gluten issues so it's a win-win situation.

For a rich, dense fruitcake you could probably use 100% almond meal, but when I make chocolate cakes I use a 3:1 ratio of almond meal and corn starch.

If you want to experiment with more high-tech compounds, then the combination of xanthan gum and guar gum is reported to have gluten-like qualities, but you really want to have digital scales because the only thing I can personally say with authority about xanthan gum is that if you use too much the result is unpalatable, and too much may be half a teaspoon.

There are several threads on gluten-free baking if you search through the archives.

[TylerK]

Thanks for your reply ChrisZ.

I have read through a number of the GF posts on here and on the web which lead me to the xanthan gum and flour composition, but fruitcake is a significantly different beast than a standard sponge cake and the typical advice given didn't seem to work. I had considered almond four at the time, but I wasn't sure how well it would stand up to the ageing period that fruitcake goes though...I didn't want the nut oils going rancid on me. There are a lot of nuts already in the cake though, so it might not be a bad thing to try if you think it will improve the texture of the cake.

I'm curious about the guar gum comment. Considering the fruit and sugar content of the recipe I was toying with the idea of adding some pectin to the recipe to see if that would help things hold together. I wasn't sure at what point in the recipe to add it though. Do you think Guar gum would be a better choice? Any idea how much should be added?

Tyler

[ChrisZ]

I haven't tried using xanthan or guar gums in gluten free baking at all, but I have made a note of bits and pieces I've read simply because I know so many people with gluten issues.

But the thing I have remembered is that the combination of xanthan gum and guar gum yields an especially gluten-like result, and it's not something you get by using either ingredient by themselves.

In the (free) recipe collection at Kymos.org, it suggests using a 2:1 ratio of xanthan gum to guar gum for gluten free baking, or 1.6% and .8% respectively in relation to soy/corn/rice or potato flours.

If your recipe equates to about 400g of gluten-free flour, that would mean 6.4g xanthan gum and 3.2g guar gum.

But if you simply google "gluten free" along with xanthan and guar, you'll get loads of pages with more detailed information.