Oatmeal Cake

This is a gluten-free cake that you’ll actually want to eat.

It’s ridiculous how tasty it is.

It’s definitely not another sad, dry, gluten-free cake that mimics the flavors of sawdust and cardboard. No mama. This cake is ridiculously divine, ridiculously hard to just eat one slice of so you’ll eat three instead, and ridiculously perfect.

If you share it with others, expect to be asked to make it for the next bazillion birthday parties.

Yep, it’s a cake…made with oatmeal.

But it’s magical oatmeal 💫 because with just a few other ingredients we’re turning our lumpy oatmeal-in-a-bowl into something that tastes like a cake from a high-end dessert shop.

Surprisingly (at least to me), oatmeal cake has been around for aaaaages. Like your grandma’s grandmother probably had a grandma who made it way back when. This recipe came to me from a scenario like that but then I decided to add my own riff to this cake’s long history by making it gluten-free with a cinnamon-ey flair and decadent cinnamon cream cheese frosting. It’s not cancel culture if you’re just making it better right?

• Hot water: Make it boiling hot. This is how we’ll soften those oats.
• Gluten-free quick cooking oats: Quick-cooking oats are the way to go in order to get that perfect crumb.
• Unsalted butter: Always the way to go so you can control the salt without the salt controlling your food.
• Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free 1-to-1 Flour: The ingredient make-up and proportions of every gluten-free flour you’ll find on the grocery store shelves are nowhere close to being similar to each other. This is the gluten-free flour I suggest for this cake. If you opt to try a different brand, it’s at your own cake’s risk.

For a full list of ingredients and quantities see the recipe card at the end of this post.

Step 1: Add hot, boiling water and quick cooking oats to a large bowl and let it sit for 20 minutes or so.

Step 2: After the oats have soaked, it’s time to transform them from plain oatmeal to something amazing. With an electric mixer, add in butter, white sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla to start the magic.

Step 3: Add in a couple of beaten eggs.

Step 4: In a separate bowl, mix together the remaining dry ingredients: gluten-free flour, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon.

Step 5: Add the dry ingredients to the wet, but probably a little at a time so that the flour doesn’t poof up into your face when you turn on the electric mixer.

Step 6: Grease and line two 9-inch cake pans with parchment paper. To get those parchment paper circles set the cake pans on the parchment paper, trace the bottom, and cut out with scissors.

Step 7: Divide the cake batter evenly between the two cake pans.

Step 8: Bake until golden and perfectly spongey. Allow the cake layers to rest in their pans for several minutes. Then gently remove cakes from their pans and place on a wire rack to cool completely before frosting and decorating.

Here’s something funny (at least to me). If you Google oatmeal cake, there are a bunch of people claiming that the recipe was their grandma’s recipe, with hand-scripted recipe cards to prove it (there were no computers back then so of course they wrote it on a recipe card). Now unless everyone had the same grandma, I’m calling malarkey on that.

So here’s the real question. Who was the OG (‘original grandma’) that all the grandmas took the recipe from? Because that grandma was definitely the original gangsta when she figured out how to transform oatmeal into a decadent cake.

Nice work g-ma. ♡