Sweet Laurel Mixes It Up

When you want to bake a cake at home, conventional store-bought mixes are awfully tempting…until you read the ingredient labels. Sugar, bleached flour and partially hydrogenated soybean oil are typically the first ingredients—and don’t even get us started on what’s in the companion frostings. That’s why we’re ecstatic that L.A.’s Sweet Laurel bakery has introduced a new chocolate cake mix that makes healthy baking a snap. The bakery, launched in 2015, crafts gorgeous custom layer cakes made with all-natural, all-organic ingredients and without any grains, gluten, dairy or refined sugars. The new mix, along with Sweet Laurel’s collection of baking supplies, allows you to replicate their creations at home.

Start with the dry mix ($20), which contains a blend of almond meal, cacao, baking soda and Himalayan pink salt. Add eggs, water and Sweet Laurel maple syrup ($21.50) to whip up two six-inch cakes. Stack and frost them with Sweet Laurel’s raw vegan caramel ($19.50), a lip-smacking blend of almond butter, coconut oil, dates, maple syrup and vanilla extract. Speaking of which, Sweet Laurel also sells their own paleo vanilla extract ($16.50) blended with tequila (instead of grain alcohol), which is naturally gluten-free.

While gluten-free cakes often taste about as good as tree bark, this cake is unequivocally delicious: moist, nutty and—especially with those drizzles of caramel—decadent.

To learn more grain-free baking tricks, sign up for one of Sweet Laurel’s workshops led by founder Laurel Gallucci, who just might be the health world’s answer to Betty Crocker.

sweetlaurel.com