Applesauce Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

As you can probably tell, I've been in a cake mood recently. This cake recipe is adapted from a recipe for applesauce cake from the Betty Crocker's Cookbook that my mom gave me way back when. The reason I asked my mom for the cookbook is that it has my favorite recipe for French toast, but I'm discovering more and more recipes in it that I like. So I shouldn't make fun of it, even though the cover is bright orange and most of the pictures are orange and green -- it's like they decided to take pictures of only orange and green food, so that the food would all go with the '70s color theme.

But I digress. What I really wanted to say is that this is a great cake: the applesauce makes it so moist, and the cinnamon, cloves, and allspice give it a nice complexity. However, the cream cheese frosting is really what turns it into a fabulous cake. Even though the girls and I try to avoid dairy products, we make an exception for this frosting. I tell myself that each piece of cake doesn't have that much frosting on it anyway. But then I eat another piece. Fortunately, Michael and the girls finished off the cake for snack today, so I can no longer be tempted.

Applesauce Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
makes an 8"x8" cake

Ingredients for the cake:

• 1 1/4 cups Bob's Red Mill Gluten-free flour
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. sea salt
• 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp. ground allspice
• 1 cup granulated white sugar
• 1/4 cup shortening. Try to use Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening, which is made from palm oil and doesn't contain any soy.
  
• 1 large egg
• 3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1/4 cup water

Instructions for the cake:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8"x8" cake pan. In a medium-size bowl, combine all of the dry ingredients except the sugar. Put the sugar, shortening, and egg in a large bowl and blend with a mixer for a couple of minutes until they are well combined and have a creamy consistency. Add the applesauce and water and mix again on low speed until combined. Then slowly add the dry ingredients to the large bowl while mixing on low speed until all of the ingredients are combined. Pour the batter into the pan and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Then let the cake cook completely before spreading on the frosting.

Ingredients for the frosting:

• 4 ounces cream cheese (not low-fat)
  
• 1 cup of extra fine granulated sugar. (Domino's brand is called superfine sugar.) This is different from powdered sugar, which contains cornstarch.
  
• 1/3 stick (2 1/2 Tbsp.) butter
• 1/2 tsp. Trader Joe's vanilla or another vanilla extract that does not contact corn syrup.
  

Instructions for the frosting:

Let the cream cheese and butter sit at room temperature until they soften. Then put the cream cheese, sugar, and butter in a mixer and beat on low speed for several minutes until the ingredients have combined and have a creamy consistency.