One Gluten-Free Cake Mix, 100 Possibilities

Cake Magic! is a simple cookbook I wrote in 2016, one that’s resonated with many hesitant bakers out there, and a project I’m really proud of. It’s part fantasy—as any great book about cakes should be, with ethereal pictures that show perfect confections ready for the celebrations that await them—and part artist’s palette. It offers simple, staple recipes and techniques that can be mixed around according to the baker’s whim to create something entirely new, even if that baker has only baked from box mixes before. From one simple mix of flours and sugar stored in the pantry spans over 100 totally different cakes.

I had no idea when I wrote it that it would eventually feel like it belonged to someone else. That an idea that strong could break under the weight of life and somehow become shameful.

Two years after the book came out, I was diagnosed with brain cancer and immediately and totally shifted my diet to exclude all of the ingredients held within Cake Magic!. I was struggling to survive and focused on my family, so it didn’t matter much to me at first. Then the scans kept coming back clean. I was told I was cancer-free, a statistic anomaly, and hope began to build for the first time since my diagnosis. As my timeline reaches forward and I look ahead to celebrations—birthdays, both mine and those of my two little sons—I yearn to bake to celebrate earning them. Give me wrinkles, give me cakes. It feels selfish to ask for decades of watching my boys grow older and hug me from giant bodies when I was only given a year to live, when I’ve seen cancer as closely as I have. But I’m asking. And hoping, even though it’s scary to and I know I shouldn’t. I’m fighting for more of everything.

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I made a cake recipe for the year anniversary of my diagnosis and wrote about it a few months ago. It felt important to face my community and share the changes to my diet when I had been feeling that my career, as I had imagined it, was over. The airing out of these fears, shattering the glass box I was trying to store it in, was a repeat of the lessons I had learned over and over during my most dimly lit days of treatment. It may sound like a platitude, but the simplest truths are really the most profound from the hopeless place of terminal cancer: Anything is possible.

Having one cake recipe felt good, empowering. But as I baked more and more with grain-free flours and alternative, unrefined sugars, a symphony of ideas came together in my head. Its momentum felt unstoppable. What if I could make a grain-free and refined sugar–free cake mix?

Yes, I thought to myself as I imagined the over 100 cakes multiplying from that one mix, populating like a cartoon of mating rabbits. I started from a hunch, which is where I start most of my baking endeavors, combined with the helpful anchor of the original Cake Magic! ratios. I mixed around some of the flours I had come to know through my own play—the rich almond and coconut flours, the versatile arrowroot and tapioca. I tried them in a few different proportions, found a balance, then added xanthan gum for stability. I tried each date and coconut sugar, and preferred coconut. I could tell by the smell I had gotten close, then took a peek in the oven to see that it was rising and browning perfectly. The crumb of the cake was a facsimile of the original: (alternative) baking success!

I wanted more.

I brought the idea to my editor, and we determined it could be treated as an official addendum. And just like that, Cake Magic! was mine again.

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The warm scent wafting from the oven reminded me of that hot Dallas summer when I was developing the recipes and systematically baked all the cakes in the book. My house smelled so much of cake (then and now) that when the fragrance spilled out from the front door, I believed for a moment that the outside world smelled of cake, too.

Working on Cake Magic! felt different this time, changed, because I was not only figuring out a recipe to serve the idea I’d created, but because I was also serving myself. I’m on both sides of the project now, deeply grateful for the versatility of the mix and the variety promised within that, but also that the book belonged to me again somehow. I could use it again and not just sign it when asked. The variations of this single recipe represent years and years of birthdays and celebrations—my life, and my future, in cake.

This official addendum is intended to be printed, folded up, and sandwiched into your copy of Cake Magic!. It includes the mix itself as well as instructions on how to translate the book’s recipes in grain- and refined sugar–free ways, so everyone can enjoy them.

If you’d like to test-drive it, here are a few of the original cake recipes. Just keep in mind that the simple vanilla cake can transform into a chocolate cake (or peanut butter, coconut, lemon, among others) as easily with very simple variations outlined in the book.

Are you a gluten-free (or paleo) baker? Tell us about your latest creations in the comments below.