Gluten-free food is seldom cheap. I found some King Arthur's brand gluten-free baking mixes on a half-price sale, the week before the price went up, and decided to test them. Only torture-test them. Baking mixes are formulated for use in full-size stoves. I used a saucepan inside an old "electric skillet" as a mini-stove, or primary office heating unit on baking days.
Glyphosate Awareness has had to bash, lash, and trash this company for using gluten-free, glyphosate-soaked flour, in the past. Even sneer..."Bleep has flour to do with King Arthur? King Alfred was the one whose legendary history features baking...silly name!" I'm glad to report that they have indeed learned about this. I believe these mixes are glyphosate- and glufosinate-free. That does not mean they'll necessarily work for any particular person. It's not that "celiacs may have multiple food allergies, because celiac disease is a very mysterious and complicated disease that nobody can fully control, so we all need to ask our doctors for prescriptions for patent medicines to suppress the symptoms" blah blah. It's that other ingredients may contain different chemical residues to which we may be sensitive in a different way. Anyway, the company has cleaned up its act enough to deserve a fair review of four of its products.
I should mention that, although this review is scheduled to appear in June, the baking experiments took place in early spring, whenever the morning felt chilly enough to justify using the electric skillet to heat up the office. As I recall, I baked the chocolate cake before the Internet Failure in March, the others during the nine weeks of Internet Failure in April and May. And this was a La Nina year when we had some refrigerator-cool nights in the first week of June...In a normal year, I would have tried to time this experiment in winter, but this year it worked in spring.
1. Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake Mix
[You can buy all four mixes shown online, and some other flavors I didn't see in my local grocery store, if they're not in a local grocery store near you:
Totally did not work for me. The big cake mix did not bake evenly in the small saucepan, which is to be expected and should not put off people who bake enough to keep a full-size stove, or bake in their wood stove. What should put you off is that some ingredient, I suspect the cocoa, didn't trigger a celiac reaction but did trigger some sort of unpleasant reaction. I felt queasy most of the day after I tested this product. The possum got most of it.
2. Gluten-Free Classic Yellow Cake Mix
Surprisingly, this one did work for me. There's enough flour in the box to bake a 9x13" sheet cake or 8" or 9" two-layer cake, but the mix did bake evenly and produce a thick cake, like two 8" layers stacked up together without frosting in between, even in the saucepan. That mix has to be idiot-proof. The cake tasted like cake and was good enough that I kept it around for a few days, eating my way through it.
"Yellow" cake, as distinct from mineral yellowcake, is a US baking tradition. It tastes like butter and eggs and milk and vanilla and sugar. It's not quite as easy to add flavoring to as "white" cake, which tastes like vanilla and sugar without the protein-rich farm food mixed in, but it takes most alternative flavorings well; you could add carob, pecans, cinnamon, banana, orange, pineapple, lemon, coconut, even grated carrots and raisins, or most other flavors anyone would add to cake. Of course some of these flavoring agents would affect the texture and baking method more than others.
3. Gluten-Free Ultimate Fudge Brownie Mix
Well...if you like fudgelike brownies, you might like this mix. It baked fairly well and tasted fairly good in the saucepan; it'd probably bake perfectly in a brownie pan. Brownies are tricky because of their high fat and sugar content. When the flour in the middle of the pan doesn't scream "raw," the edges of the pan tend to have reached a consistency that reminds people of bricks. To avoid wasting either middles or edges of a pan of brownies it's good to use a thick pan in which the batter forms a thin layer and bake at a low temperature. You can't expect a traditional brownie mix to bake well in a saucepan. Again, no celiac reaction, but the cocoa didn't seem to want to stay down.
4. Gluten-Free Banana Bread Mix
This baked well, even in the saucepan. I cheated by enhancing it with about half a bag of whole pecans. It rose and cohered well enough to make a good bread, even with the pecans, and even though I carelessly let the bottom scorch. With the pecans it was delicious.
These mixes are expensive when they're not on sale, and I don't plan to heat up the house by baking again till September or October in any case. However, the banana bread mix is terrific. I believe it would work, with traditional spices and mixed fruit, for a fruitcake-that-people-will-actually-eat such as Grandma Bonnie Peters used to make. If people expected edible fruitcake from me I would start experimenting in September to get the right proportions of fruit and nuts to this batter, but it's well mixed and could probably carry almost as much fruit and nuts as a wheat-based fruitcake batter. If your family like fruity, nutty baked goods, this mix may be worth its price.
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