So remember how I used spaghetti squash to adapt the Trim Healthy Mama Trimtastic Zucchini cake  (page 296 of the Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook)? I did the same thing with the recipe recently. Only this time I did have some zucchini on hand so I made the cake with squash AND zucchini. I also improved the cake by doing two things:

1. Waiting until the cake was chilled before frosting it. That kept the cake from melting the frosting.
2. Dressing it up into a double layer birthday cake with more decoration, including strawberries.

My husband had a birthday last week so I had fun dolling the cake up. Here is the recipe again with my instructions on how to make into a fancy birthday cake. Like I mentioned before, It is adapted from the THM Trimtastic Cake. It is doubled in size, and with a change in the flours because one of my kids can’t have almond flour, which is in the THM Baking Blend.

Gluten-free Sugar-free Chocolate Birthday Cake (Low Carb, Keto)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease two round cake pans with butter

Mix the following:

3 cups pureed cooked spaghetti squash, yes spaghetti squash, or a combination of pureed squash and pureed zucchini

(I use spaghetti squash as a low-carb noodle sub, cooked for 1 1/2 hours at 375 degrees after poking it a few times with a fork. Cut in half after baking, use oven mitts, then after it is cool, scrape out the seeds. After using for noodles I save the leftovers for omelettes and baking low-carb treats like this)

8 eggs, yes 8!

1 stick of butter melted (1/2 cup)

Then add the dry ingredients and mix more:

3/4 c oat fiber

3/4 c ground golden flaxseed

1 1/2 c ground erythritol powder (I still feel funny when using this, it seems so fake to me, but for times when sugar causes more problems than erythritol might I am OK using it)

1 1/2 tsp stevia extract

1 T vanilla extract

2 tsp aluminum-free baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

4 pinches mineral salt

8 T cocoa powder

1 cup stevia sweetened chocolate chips

Mix thoroughly. Pour into two greased round cake pans. I had a hard time getting the cake pans out onto a serving platter, so next time I will dust the pans with wheat flour. I had just greased them and not floured them. I had to use a butter knife and do the tapping thing. If you are allergic to wheat then try dusting with oat fiber and or arrowroot  powder. I’m not sure how that will turn out, it just sounds like it will. I haven’t tried it yet. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until knife inserted comes out clean.

Cool completely by sticking in a fridge.

Frost with this easy chocolate frosting:

Whip 3 cups real cream until fluffy (stiff peaks) then add stevia and teeny bit of mineral salt and cocoa to taste. Or leave out the cocoa and add vanilla for a white frosting. Make most of it chocolate frosting, and save some to be white/vanilla.

After the cake has chilled, carefully turn upside down onto a serving platter. Frost* that layer. Then put on the second layer, and frost that. Add some strawberries, as my daughter did, decoratively, and then put the white frosting in a cake decorator tube (I use this one from Pampered Chef, it’s so much better than using bags) and trim the edges with a fancy tip. The picture below, although not totally pretty picture perfect, shows the generous frosting layers. I’m sure yours will be much more blog- photo-stylized-worthy! This cake is so filling with the frosting made out of pure cream that you can only eat one slice for dessert. Then have the rest for breakfast the next day! Then you will be hungry enough to have more than one piece! 🙂

*Frost generously! As I mentioned in my last post about this recipe, this frosting reminds me of the quote from the children’s book, Gone Away Lake, where Mrs. Cheever, the neighbor lady, says that the proper way to make a chocolate cake is to frost generously so that it looks like “built” like an adobe home. So I “built” my cake with the frosting this time as a double-layer cake and it definitely looks adobe-like! I love it! (I don’t know why the frosting looks almost pink, it didn’t have any red food dye to color it, just cocoa powder to make it a pale brown.)