I am not the biggest fan of cooking, which is why you will find most of my recipes fairly easy.   If it’s not simple or I can’t make it simple I don’t do it.  But I love to bake.   For my Bible study I have been making the desserts and I am enjoying it so much.  I always make a regular dessert filled with the sugary goodness that a “sinful” dessert requires, and a sugar-free dessert because  all of us can’t enjoy that much “sin” in our lives.    Puns intended there.

Here is what we had last night.   Cinnamon coffee cake and sugar free peanut butter brownies.

I will post the recipe for the brownies in another post so that it can be filed under sugar-free.  By the way I have enjoyed cooking sugar-free.  I wish I could get my whole family on board with it.  I am not missing the sugar at all in those desserts.

Cinnamon Coffee cake.

1 box of gluten-free vanilla/yellow/white cake mix.***

1 box of vanilla instant pudding

Rest of the ingredients depends on cake mix used.

Cinnamon goodness inside

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoon cinnamon

Cinnamon goodness topping

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoon butter softened

Simply follow the directions on the cake mix.  Usually you add eggs/butter/vanilla and water.   The only thing you do different is add in box of dry instant pudding. (Do not make the pudding just add in the powder)  This is going a to puff up so even though it don’t look like it’s a lot of batter you want a 8×8 minimum although I used a 9×12.

Spread ½ of the batter into the pan.  Its sticky so put some blobs around the greased pan and then spay the top of the dough.**** this makes it easy to spread with a spatula and you may need to spray the spatula here and there, depending on how hard it is to spread.  NOTE: you want your batter no more than an inch thick.

Sprinkle the top with the cinnamon goodness (inside) you can opt to swirl it in but I just sprinkle it on top.  It all tastes the same.

Put the remaining ½ of the batter on top of that.  Again blob it around as it makes it easier to spread than one lump in the middle.   Again nonstick spray works great.  You will pick up some of the cinnamon but try not to get too much.

Then dollop the cinnamon goodness (topping) on top, depending on how big a pan you used you may be able to cover the whole thing or you may just have dollops.  Either way it all cooks great.  You don’t want to leave massive spaces however or when you cut it someone will get a piece without topping.

Bake according to cake directions, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.  Let set before slicing and serve to the waiting guests.

***I used eating right gluten-free yellow cake for this bath but I used arrowhead mills for the previous one and both were awesome.  Betty Crocker makes one as well but in my opinion their cake comes out ½ as large as these two do. So you may have way too much cinnamon goodness if that’s possible.

**** remember Pam grill is the only nonstick spray I have found in my stores that is gluten/soy free.  Yes you have to watch for gluten in nonstick sprays!

Enjoy. A new camera setting made these look almost evil but I wanted you to see how the filling and topping looked.