This gluten-free Earthquake Cake recipe easy to make and can be served in the pan you baked it in making it easy to take to potlucks.
Have you ever had an Earthquake Cake? They are amazingly delicious! Coconut, pecans, and molten cream cheese lava bursting through the fissures in the chocolate cake. One of my friends describes this cake as a “chocolate love bomb”. If you haven't had Earthquake Cake before, you want to put it on your to-try list.
Gluten-Free Earthquake Cake
Earthquake cakes are usually made by doctoring a packaged cake mix, but I decided to make a Gluten-Free Earthquake Cake from scratch by adapting my gluten-free chocolate cake recipe because the only way to improve on this cake would be to make it entirely from scratch!
The first layer is coconut and pecans. You pour the chocolate cake mix over the coconut and pecans.
Drop tablespoons of the cream cheese mixture onto the cake mix and then run a knife through it to spread it throughout the cake mix.
The finished product isn't exactly pretty. In fact, we sometimes call this a volcanic explosion cake. But what it lacks in looks, it more than makes up for with the flavorful combination of ingredients.
Printable Gluten-Free Earthquake Cake Recipe
- ¾ cup white rice flour
- ¾ cup tapioca flour
- ¼ cup potato starch
- 1 teaspoon guar gum
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 2 cups sugar
- ¾ cup + 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- ⅔ cup oil
- 1 cup boiling water
- ½ cup milk (or rice milk)
- 1 teaspoon gf vanilla
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1 cup pecans chopped
- 4 oz. of cream cheese, softened
- 4 oz. of butter, melted
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 13 x 9 Baking Dish.
- Mix the coconut and pecans together. Sprinkle the coconut mixture on the bottom of the baking dish:
- In a large bowl combine white rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch, guar gum, and sugar.
- Place cocoa in a small bowl. Pour the boiling water over the cocoa.
- Add oil, milk, eggs, and vanilla to the cocoa mixture.
- Add the liquids to the flour mixture and beat for 2 –3 minutes on high.
- Pour over the coconut mixture.
- Blend the butter, cream cheese and powdered sugar together.
- Drop by the tablespoon full on top of the cake mix:
- I take a knife and run it between the lumps of the cream cheese mixture.
- Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in pan placed on top of a wire rack.
More Gluten-Free Cake Recipes:
- Gluten-Free Cola Cake
- Gluten-Free Vanilla Cake
- Gluten-Free Mocha Fudge Cake
- Gluten-Free Hummingbird Bundt Cake
- Gluten-Free German Chocolate Cake with Dairy-Free Topping
This recipe is shared at Gluten-Free Wednesdays and Allergy-Free Wednesday.
Shirley @ gfe & All Gluten-Free Desserts says
What an amazing looking cake, Alea! I don’t care if it’s super pretty; it looks absolutely decadent! 🙂 It’s definitely a “must try”! I just featured this recipe over at All Gluten-Free Desserts … All the Time. 🙂
Thanks!
Shirley
April @ The 21st Century Housewife says
This sounds so delicious! I’ve always hesitated to make it because of the cake mix, so this will be a fun recipe for me to try 🙂
Linda says
This looks amazingly good, Alea. I’ve never had an earthquake cake–gluten free or otherwise. Thanks for sharing it at Gluten-Free Wednesdays.
Mykel says
Hi. Thanks this looks amazing! Question, can the
•¾ cup white rice flour
•¾ cup tapioca flour
•¼ cup potato starch
•1 teaspoon guar gum
Be replaced with a gf all purpose flour, if so how much? And I would still need the baking powder right?
Alea Milham says
You should be able to replace the white rice flour, tapioca flour and potato starch and guar gum with 1 3/4 cup gf all-purpose flour. You would still need to add baking powder. I hope you enjoy the cake!
Shard says
Wowsers! I am so excited to try this! It looks like the kind of sneaky delight that my Dad would love and never know it’s Gluten Free. Thanks!
Florrey says
Hi Alea,
I’ve never heard of Earthquake Cake before, but yesterday I stumbled over this amazing looking cake on Pinterest – but since I’m a purist baker that doesn’t like cake mixes AND a gf eating friend came visiting today I googled and stumbled over your recipe and the cake blew us all away, sooo delicious! <3
I used an all-purpose gf flour consisting of potato starch, corn starch, corn flour, rice flour and guar gum, which worked fine, and chopped almonds because it's really difficult to get plain pecan nuts in German supermarkets, which also tasted great. But the absolute best ist the caramelized chewy-crunchy crust of the topping!
The only thing that did confuse me a bit was the amount of loose coconut shreds under the cake. It's probably more than half of the amount that didn't stuck to the dough. Is that normal or did I make something wrong? Next time, I would probably use only 1/2 cup.
Anyway, thank you soooo much for this amazing recipe! <3
Alea Milham says
Hi,
I am so glad you enjoyed this cake recipe. The coconut usually gets embedded in the bottom of the cake. I am not sure why it didn’t happen on yours. I usually use the sweetened shredded coconut found in American stores. I just said shredded coconut in the recipe – not aware of all the different types that existed when I wrote this recipe. Perhaps that could be the cause?
I definitely need to update this old recipe and take new pictures. Thanks for the inspiration. If I think of anything when I am updating the recipes, I will let you know. ~Alea
Florrey says
Hi Alea,
thank you for the reply! Looking at the Pictures again I also think that it depends on the different Kind of coconut. Here in Germany, you don’t get sweetened coconut at all, maybe the sugar caramalizes and adds to sticking to the cake bottom? Additionally, the shreds I used were extremely fine, I’ll try to get larger shreds next time so that there is more “space” between them so that maybe the dough will flow into the gaps? If I don’t find it, I’ll just stick with only half the amount 😉