Happy Birthday Beer Bread!

This weekend I celebrated my 24th birthday!  It was a lovely low-key day spent with Joe and Oy, and it was the perfect way to relax after an exciting three days of graduation and exploring downtown Chicago with my mom (more on that later).

While maxing-realaxing all cool I realized that we still needed to make a birthday cake! My family has always taken the term "birthday cake" pretty flexibly as we never make cake otherwise and it goes largely uneaten every time.  My dad opts for spice cake, and since CJ and I are summer birthdays we usually go the route of angel food cake and smother it in strawberries and ice cream.  Sometimes we make brownies because we actually eat them.  I think I might even have had pie on one delicious occasion.  In any case, I started surfing through my "cookbook" which is an old binder jammed with print-outs and pages torn from magazines.  I found a contender- chocolate cake with a whipped cream frosting from a Penzey's catalog- but I also came across beer bread which we got much more excited about.

We figured you bake it and can put a candle in it, so why not?  We've even talked about how if we got married we could have a "cake" that was just layers of different breads and cheeses, so it's really just putting ideals into practice.

Gluten-free Pumpkin Bundt Cake

As a student I have a massive procrastinating habit.  I've come to terms with it, and still getting everything in on time, so it doesn't bother me in the slightest.  When I'm in group projects, it's a whole different story- especially when my group members are friends.  So for this assignment everyone else spent 2-3 weeks on, I obviously devoted two solid days to, and got it in a whopping two hours before it was due. I felt bad about everyone else spending hours dutifully hunting down data that I just used without having to yell at the internet so I solved this problem with baking! As one of our members has the very sad condition of Celiac Disease (I would mourn the loss of bread/bagels daily), this baking project is gluten-free.  She also LOVES pumpkin- so this is right up her alley.

That said, I want to be clear that I RARELY bake without gluten and am not in any way an expert on this matter.  According to the World Wide Web, some people can't even have their food cooked with utensils that used flour in a previous life, so check with your food recipients on the seriousness of their condition before you give them a bad case of bowel grumpiness.