Lotus ‘s Absolutely No-Gluten Chocolate Cake

Lotus is a woman who really cooks from scratch. To make her favorite totally-gluten-free chocolate cake she begins in her garden. Making it starts about a year before she puts the in the oven. First, she has to prepare her garden soil. In September, she plants the seeds for her garbanzo beans. They winter over, she says, and come up in the spring.

"What have garbanzos got to do with baking chocolate cake?" you wonder. A lot. Come summer she harvest beans from her prolific garbanzo vines, shells them and dries them in her solar-powered food dryer. When dry, she grinds the beans into flour.

At the Vashon Preservation event on August 19th, she described the process and gave me a printout of her recipe, with permission to publish it.

LOTUS’S CHOCOLATE CAKE

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

1 12 cups cooked garbanzo beans (chick peas)

4 eggs or 1 cup egg substitute

¼ to ½ cup sugar

1 ¼ cups shredded or chopped cabbage, carrots, or kale.

4 Tablespoons powdered chocolate

1 ½ cups semisweet dark chocolate chips

4 Tablespoons powdered chocolate

Melt chocolate chips in the microwave for 2 minutes, or in a double boiler. Put all ingredients into a food processor or strong blender and process until smooth. Pour batter into a nonstick 9-inch cake pan. Bake 45 minutes. After the cake cools, sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired.

Lotus says she has used white beans & pintos for her chocolate cake, too.

Not into baking cakes? Don’t blame you. I’m writing this on the hottest week of this summer. This is chips and dips weather. With tahini, lemon juice, and garlic, you can make your own hummus in a blender or food processor, and get more of it for your money.

HUMMUS

Makes about 3 cups

Store in refrigerator

1 15ounce can garbanzos or 1 ½ cups home-cooked garbanzos

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely minced or crushed

¾ cup tahini

1/3 to ½ cup lemon juice, bottled kind okay

Drain the garbanzos, reserving the liquid. Puree in food processor or blender.

With back of a teaspoon, crush the garlic with the sale if minced. The sharp little salt grains cut into the garlic bits for more successful mashing.

Add the tahini and lemon juice. Give the ingredients a whirl in your blender or food processor. Blend in a little reserved liquid from the garbanzos to get the right thick, creamy consistency. Adjust the juice and salt and blend in a dash of cayenne red pepper. Taste. Add a wee bit more cayenne if you’d like it hotter.

To vary the flavor and color, you can a little tomato paste in part of your hummus. Or cut back on the garlic.

Nutrition tip: Eat beans for your bones’ sakes. Garbanzo and pinto beans, especially, are excellent sources of calcium that is more readily metabolized than the calcium in milk because only beans also yield magnesium, 79 milligrams (mg) per cupful. Milk has no magnesium, so what little milk calcium your body can use depends on your getting enough magnesium from other sources. Make it chocolate milk and you get 33 mg. of magnesium, enough to balance 1/3 of an 8-ounce glass of milk.

Garbanzos, a.k.a. chick peas, when cooked yield 80 to 150 milligrams of calcium and 79 mg. of magnesium per cupful. When accompanied with magnesium and Vitamin D, calcium replaces the old worn-out calcium our bones continually discard and strengthens the bones. Despite what milk advertisers boast, milk does not produce strong bones. Magnesium is the mineral that does that. Unless you combine it with something rich in magnesium at the same meal, that calcium either goes to waste or lodges in your joints or eventually forms painful calcium spurs.