Frybruary Finale: Gluten-Free Funnel Cake

Funnel Cake

Welcome back to Frybruary! Today I’m covering a recipe for county fair fare…funnel cake! The fair was just in town a few weeks ago, and oh how I’ve missed this delicious treat. So this week I made my own.

Before making my recipe, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. This friend happens to have grown up at carnivals making funnel cakes. His advice included some great tips:

“Keep the oil hot. If you think it’s hot enough, it’s not hot enough.”
“Dripping is the hardest thing to learn. You have to find the right height and if you drip the batter all onto the same spot it’ll be lumpy and cooked uneven.”
“Also flip it quick and pull it quick. It’s temperamental and burns quick.”
“You really just need to practice it in my experience. Every summer I sorta had to relearn how to do it.”

Some of his other tips weren’t as helpful, but that’s probably because he was making regular funnel cakes, and gluten-free recipes don’t always follow the same rules. After a little practice, I figured out how to make a delicious gluten-free funnel cake.

Ingredients:

1 ½ c. 1-to-1 flour
1 c. AP flour
¼ c. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
2 eggs
1 ½ c. milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:

Cut tip off condiment squeeze bottle for easy dispensing of batter.
In a large cast iron skillet, preheat oil on medium-high heat (6.5/10).
In large mixing bowl, combine flours, sugar, salt, and leavening agents. Whisk to break up any large lumps. In a separate bowl, beat together eggs, milk, and vanilla.
Pour wet into dry and mix thoroughly until batter is smooth and lump-free.
Fill condiment bottle with batter. Batter will be thick and hard to handle, and will take work to transfer without making a mess. (See tips below.)
Check oil temperature by watching for surface shimmer and holding hand over the oil to sense radiant heat energy. Adjust temperature if necessary.
Use a wide ring mold to contain batter in shape as it sets. Hold ring mold in place at the surface of the oil with tongs using non-dominant hand, and squeeze batter into the oil, moving around the space within the mold. Work quickly to fry in batches of 2-3 funnel cakes at a time.
Flip each funnel cake in the order in which it was deposited into the oil. Each funnel cake will only take 3-5 minutes total to cook, depending on oil temperature and size of ring mold.
Remove each cake when done, and drain briefly on a cooling rack. Serve warm with powdered sugar, chocolate syrup, cinnamon sugar, or a whole fruit syrup with whipped cream.

So that’s how you make gluten-free funnel cake for a crowd! If you need fewer funnel cakes, this recipe can easily be cut in half.

Also, it’s a simple recipe on paper. There is one extremely difficult step, and that’s getting the batter into a bottle. In my video I used a funnel and pushed the batter through by pumping a straw through the bottom. After shooting my video, I went to refill the bottle to store the extra batter in the fridge, and figured out the trick.

Because my mixing bowl is so large and the batter is so thick, I knew the batter wouldn’t come out in a pour so much as a plop. Then I realized I could use a rubber spatula to rig a pour spout by holding the spatula in place to guide the flow of batter and make it come out of the bowl in a fine enough stream to get it into the bottle without any additional fuss.

I hope you enjoy making funnel cakes at home! It’s a little bit of a project, but the outcome is so worth the effort. Please leave your thoughts in a comment below, or get in touch with me directly by filling out the form on the contact page.

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Frybruary Finale: Gluten-Free Funnel Cake

Jamie

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