Easy gluten-free, high-protein blueberry cake

This delicious cake honestly ticks so many boxes for my whole family – just don’t tell the kids the secret ingredient*… or DO tell them, if you want more than one slice yourself!

Protein Packed

My two kids / young adult males, are both obsessed with being in their best shape. This is very healthy, it means they go running, go to the gym, do press-ups, pull-ups and calisthenics (sp) – it also means they eat a lot of food, eggs, full fat milk (don’t – I know!) and are forever berating my food-offerings as not having enough protein. I’m a vegetarian, what can I say – I’m not cooking meat for them – they are old enough and skilled enough to cook their own meals if they don’t like my cooking 😜

Gluten intolerance

Meanwhile, their dad has a gluten intolerance, sighs, so compromising further the cooking / shopping list – as if I don’t find that tedious enough already!

I love cake

And I love to bake a cake. And – to eat more than one slice of cake, however, this recipe is clearly so delicious, I only managed to snaffle just one small portion for myself in the 14 hours that it sat (overnight too) in the cake tin in the kitchen.

Butter Bean freak

I wish I’d told them BEFORE they ate it that it had a tin of butter beans* in it?

You will need:

Ingredients

• 400g butter beans, drained and rinsed
• 200g blueberries
• 50ml olive oil
• 3 medium free range organic eggs
• zest and juice of 2 unwaxed lemons
• 100g Fairtrade sugar
• 150g ground almonds
• 90g very fine polenta (you don’t want a gritty cake)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

For the sugar syrup, mix together the:

• juice of 1 large lemon
• 50g any Fairtrade sugar

What you do with all of the above:

Heat oven to 180ºC/160ºC fan/gas mark 4.
Line a loaf tin with baking paper.

Pop the butter beans and olive oil into a blender whizz up to a smoothish paste.
Stir in the three eggs, and add the lemon zest and juice, sugar, almond flour, polenta and the teaspoon of baking powder.
Spoon half the ingredients into the loaf tin, add a handful of blueberries, and spread the other half of the cake mix on top to sandwich them in.
Finish with a scattering of blueberries and bake in the over for 45 mins.

When baked, drizzle over the sugar syrup and let cool before removing from tin and cooling further on a rack.

Gluten free high protein cake with secret ingredients

The choice is now yours – confess at will – do you tell them this delicious cake has butter beans in it??

Note on the polenta, if you don’t have the fine variety, whizz the dry ingredients in a nutribullet type blender first – this also works with sugar if you don’t have icing sugar!

I can’t honestly remember the origins of this recipe, however check out https://www.instagram.com/georginafuggle who should be credited.