Chocolate chip coffee cake

This was one of those recipes that seemed too-good-to-be-true easy.  And, it skirted the woods of yeah-it-was-too-good-to-be-true-it-wasn't-very-awesome, but managed to stay out of them.

Here's the recipe over at The GFCF Experience.  Go look at their picture.  That there is an awesome looking of piece of coffee cake.  Especially given how simple this recipe is.

The cake I made didn't quite look like that.  I take all responsibility for that.

My all purpose GF flour mix was "mystery flour".  I'm pretty sure it was Bette Hagman's all-purpose flour blend, but we are not good about properly labeling the random shit containers of leftover flours in the fridge.  So I don't really know.  One of the containers was marked "corn starch", but I'm really pretty sure it was an old label.  I comparison felt the flour in that container with the one labeled "cake mix".  Honestly, they both felt equally starchy, which was actually very starchy.  But, I was fairly certain there was no sugar or xanthan gum in the blends and so ignored the extra starchy feel and forged on.

I also used soy milk, of which I had an open container, rather than the recommended almond milk.

I did not bother with the spice topping since I was making this for our common meal potluck (whenever there is a 5th Wednesday we do a potluck) and I decided to keep it simple since half of the eaters were going to be kids.

The first sign of un-awesomeness was that once the batter was mixed, it was incredibly sticky and gloppy.  It took some work to spread it out evenly in the cake pan.  Once it was somewhat even, it was decidedly mountain-rangey with lots of peaks and valleys.  I didn't see how I could smooth it out without using a well-oiled spatula, so I decided to leave it.

Interesting.  I had a perfectly good idea, but didn't try it out.  Rather, I thought: maybe it'll smooth itself out once it hits the hot oven.  You know, kind of melt into a smooth surface.

It didn't.  It came out of the oven very...textural.

It tasted good.  But, you really can't go wrong with chocolate chips, especially if they are still warm enough that they are a touch gooey.

The consistency was very dense yet spongey, so it was light.  And really moist.  Not overly so, but distinctly so.

My cake did not rise as much as theirs did.  Maybe because I doubled the recipe and used my 11x14 cake pan.  (Which, if my math is correct, means the cake had more area to cover, more shallowly, than it would have in two 8x8 pans.)

I have no picture of the cake because I forgot to take one when it came out.  Friends were starting to arrive and there was a flurry of getting serving utensils, condiments, etc.  And, despite my goings on, the cake was good enough that the twelve of us eating tonight polished the whole thing off.  In about 15 minutes.  :-)

So, though it wasn't perfect, I guess it was pretty awesome.