Nostalgia Mondays: Gluten-Free Austrian Gugelhupf Recipe

Half was eaten before I could take a picture. The bundt pan skinned the top off of it when I tried to pry the cake out of the pan.

When I was a kid, I lived for six years in Austria (birthplace of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mozart; if you’re thinking of Heath Ledger and kangaroos, then you’re thinking of Australia). Neither of my parents are Austrian; no one in my family has any connection to the country. This is all to say that Austrian cooking was no great part of my childhood in Austria. We did not cook according to our country. Anything Austrian was cooked by someone else, at a restaurant, or a roadside stand, or at school; my family was, and continues to be, Canadian carb monsters in our cooking. Because Austrian dishes were so rare (and delicious!), they stand out in my memory. The greatest of them all is the Gugelhupf. This is not some fake thing that only tourists eat: real Austrians make this stuff, and it’s delicious!

My memory of the Gugelhupf of my childhood stems from when I was about seven or eight, and was going to meetings at my friend’s house to prepare for my First Communion. We had been organized into groups, and the parents of some students had volunteered to lead these groups in discussion and worksheet-doing. I have no memory of what I was taught or what we discussed; my educated guess is that it was basically Sunday school (there was no regular Sunday school at my church). I do, however, remember the glorious Gugelhupf that my friend’s mother made for us. Lightly dusted with icing sugar and marbled with cocoa, it was beautiful.

A Gugelhupf is basically a bundt cake. As I said, I’m not Austrian; I am sure there are specific qualities that set this beauty apart from your basic bundt. I don’t even have a cherished family recipe to follow; I just adapted a couple that I found on the internet. The one my friend’s mother made was marbled, so that’s how I made it. I’m also gluten intolerant, so this is a gluten-free recipe. Celiacs rejoice! If you’re lactose intolerant, sub almond milk or coconut milk (sooooo tasty) for the cream.

This recipe is adapted mainly from the New York Times’ ‘Old Vienna Marbled Guglehupf’ recipe, which was apparently adapted from Ulli Stahl, the creator of Ulli’s Bisculli, a dessert biscuit. That’s all the info I have. I don’t even have a link. God, I’d make an awful journalist.

A couple of Classics friends, Romans, countrymen, to eat the Gugelhupf.

GUGELHUPF (pronouned GOO-gel-HOOpf, with hard g’s)

1 bundt pan, greased with butter (dust the buttered pan with flour for extra non-stick properties)

4 eggs, separated

2 cups rice flour (or 2.5 cups normal flour, if you wanna be all wheatie)

0.25 cup potato starch (ignore if you’re a wheatie)

1.25 cups sugar

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup heavy cream

0.5 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1/3 cup water

optional: 1 tablespoon booze of some sort, rum or Cognac (I didn’t have any, and I didn’t miss it)

RECIPE

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter the pan and dust it with flour.

2. Beat egg yolks with sugar and booze until creamy

3. Sift flour with baking powder and stir alternating dollops of yolky sugar and the heavy cream.

4. Using clean everything (bowl, beater), beat the egg whites until you see stiff peaks. This is going to take some time. If you’re a drinker (I’m not), you might want a swig of that booze to keep you going; your arm is going to hurt.

5. Spoon egg whites into batter. Stir it up a little. Divide resulting batter into two bowls.

6. Mix cocoa powder with water to make a paste. Stir this into one of the batter halves.

7. Spoon 2/3 of the plain batter into the bundt pan. Spoon cocoa batter over this. Spoon remaining plain batter over the cocoa batter. Do not mix. It does it itself (MAGIC!).

8. Bake for about one hour. When a toothpick, inserted into the centre of the cake, emerges clean (a few crumbs on it is fine, you’re just trying to avoid gooey, raw, middles) remove cake from heat, invert onto a plate, and let it stand for a couple of hours. Yep, that’s right: a couple of hours. I skipped this step and tore the top of my cake off: cake massacre.

9. When cool, cut into thick chunks, dust with icing sugar, and share with friends.

Mine came out slightly dry and sweet, but it didn’t crumble into nothingness, as gluten-free recipes often do. I think it has to do with the separated eggs: what a revelation! My baking will never be the same! I’m separating ALL THE EGGS. If I’m going to completely disregard any cultural authority on this recipe, I would suggest adding a dollop of apple sauce to make it a bit moister.