I have the perfect Valentine’s Day dessert recipe for you to try! And of course, it includes CHOCOLATE ?  This chocolate quinoa cake, in case you can’t tell by the title, DOES indeed have quinoa in it. (mind blown). And yes, it is intensely chocolate and decadent and absolutely delicious. This chocolate quinoa cake is made with a base of cooked quinoa instead of flour and has a fluffy texture just like traditional cake! This cake is naturally gluten free. It also has zero butter or oil and uses cashew butter (or sub another nut butter of your choice!) instead. It’s much lower in sugar than most cake recipes too. I absolutely love the chocolate frosting made with just TWO ingredients and literally tastes like fudge. I cannot wait for you to try this recipe!

In full discloser, I was not the first to come up with the idea of putting quinoa in cake! This recipe was adapted and inspired by this recipe from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe!  However, I wanted to make a smaller batch, drastically reduce the sugar, and use nut butter in place of the butter. It took a few rounds of recipe testing to get this recipe JUST right, but I am so happy with the final result!

Quinoa in Cake?!

I realize you might be wondering how quinoa works in a cake recipe, 🙂 This cake, as hopefully depicted by the pictures, does indeed have a fluffy, decadently chocolate taste and texture! After cooking the quinoa, you will blend the quinoa with the other cake batter ingredients in a blender. I use my Vitamix, but a food processor or other blender should work ok! The quinoa will blend up into a smooth batter (that’s quite tasty, if I do say so!).

Ingredients and Substitution Ideas

Quinoa

You will need to cook the quinoa first! Cook according to package directions, although I used 1/3 cup dry quinoa and 2/3 cups water, which yielded just about a perfect 1 cup of cooked quinoa in the recipe. However, you can obviously cook a larger amount of quinoa and use the leftovers to use in this cake recipe! You can even use tri-color or white color quinoa, as the color will be masked by the cocoa powder anyways. Quinoa is naturally gluten free and high in protein.

Cashew Butter

Almost every single cake recipe, whether box mix or homemade, uses oil (or occasionally butter). I used cashew butter as a healthy fat in this cake! If you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I LOVE using nut butters in recipes! Honestly, the amount of nut butter I consume is rather astounding. At any given time I’d say I have an average of 6 open jars in the fridge. Usually natural peanut butter, tahini, cashew or almond butter, a chocolate nut butter (recently a chocolate tahini), sunflower seed butter, and then often a homemade nut butter (pecan, hazelnut, etc.).

Sugar

I have tested with coconut sugar and brown sugar! I usually use brown sugar, as I always have that on hand. I have actually not tested this cake with white sugar. You can probably sub white sugar for the brown sugar, but note I haven’t tried it myself! I tend to prefer brown sugar over white as I like the flavor and moistness it adds to baked goods.

Cocoa powder

I used a mixture of both regular and dark (Hershey’s) cocoa powder for this cake! However, you can use all of one or the other (although I personally wouldn’t use all dark cocoa powder as it would be a very dark chocolate/not sweet flavor, and there isn’t a lot of sugar in this recipe to begin with). Cocoa powder obviously gives this cake the chocolate flavor!

Milk

Any type of milk will work here; dairy or plant alternative. I used oat milk in this cake recipe. The milk helps thin out the batter a bit!

Eggs

Eggs are obviously in almost all cake recipes; they are used as a binder and to achieve a fluffy cake texture!

Spices and such

Vanilla extract adds flavor, salt brings out the sweetness and brings all the flavors together, baking soda and powder help provide lift and the cake to rise, and espresso powder (optional) brings out a more robust, intense chocolate flavor!