Mixed Berry Dump Cake (Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free)

Hi everybody, welcome to Chris Cooks. So happy to have you join me today. I am making dessert. If I'm going to make dessert, I don't want it taking me more than five minutes. It can cook for however long it needs to, but assembly time, five minutes tops, that's what this is. I'm making a wild berry dump cake. It's got some chocolate, pistachio, very easy, grain-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, all that stuff. Let's get to it. First thing to start with, six to seven cups of whatever berries you want. Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries. I have blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries here. And to that, we'll add some honey. We're going to add about a quarter cup. You can also do whatever sweetener of choice you want. My sweetener of choice almost always is honey. Pinch of salt to this. A couple decent pinches, but not too much. Salt will help bring out the flavor, but if you add too much, then it'll just taste salty. Next, we'll mix that around, kind of get that honey incorporating. It will start to break down the berries. We want that for when we add the cake mix. A lemon. Give it a roll. The zest of one whole lemon. This will end up being like one to two teaspoons. Now the juice of that lemon. You want to get like two to three tablespoons. Next, our cake mix. I use Simple Mills for everything because we're grain-free, gluten-free, dairy-free. They make my favorite products for that. Just their white cake mix. One box of that. Right in. The cake mix calls for like a third a cup of oil. We're not going that hard on it. Maybe a tablespoon of just olive oil. I like the flavor that olive oil gives to a cake. If you don't like that flavor, use whatever kind of oil you want. A couple more things. Pistachios, about a quarter cup. Just do a rough chop. Right in to our bowl. Then a quarter cup of baking chocolate. I use hue chocolate again for dietary restrictions. I think it's the best. This one, I want there to be small pieces. I want there to be big pieces. So I'm not going to be very careful with that. Just like this is perfect. Stir that all to combine it until you have a uniform texture. You should not see any dry ingredients. The thing that I love about this cake, it's very heavy on the fruit and less heavy on all the other stuff that's added into it. And that's kind of my approach in general to food. Real ingredients as much as possible. You know, and I'm not a big stickler on that. I think that it's fun to have cakes and candy and all that stuff. But in general, I think the more real food you can eat, the better you're going to feel. Now we want to grease our baking sheet. You can do like avocado oil spray, olive oil spray. Just spread on butter if you're not dairy-free. My favorite is actually this. For this cake, this is bacon grease. I think that the smokiness that comes out of bacon grease is amazing with this cake. Trick my mom taught me for greasing a baking pan is just a plastic sandwich bag. Grab your grease and spread it on. The plastic won't absorb any of the grease, so you're not going to lose any. You know sometimes if you use like a paper towel or something like that, it just absorbs it. In goes the mix. Spread that out nice and evenly. Cover this with foil in the oven. 350 degrees on convection setting if you have it. It's going to be about 30 minutes covered. Then we'll remove the foil and finish it until it's cooked all the way through. For my oven, that's about 20 to 30 additional minutes. And we want to get that browning on the top. When it isn't jiggly, that's when you're getting close. This has sat now for about 20-30 minutes to cool down. Things have settled a little bit. If you just dig right into this, right out of the oven, obviously you're going to destroy your mouth. But let's take a look. The thing that I love about this cake, it turns out very almost custard-like. It's so soft and just fluffy. The smell of it, the chocolate, the berries. I mean it's almost like a bread pudding kind of texture. I love it. I love it. It's hot still. Served warm with, you know, a scoop of ice cream, dairy-free ice cream if that applies to you. This is so comforting. The flavor of it is just dynamite. I love it so much. But it's not heavy. I don't want to eat a meal and then follow it up with a big heavy dessert, you know. You could also chill it overnight and it makes a great breakfast because it's a lot of berries. It doesn't have a bunch of extra junk in it. You know, add a little protein on the side and this is just a great way to finish a meal or start your day. I would love to know what you think about this. Give it a try. Let me know in the comments. The full recipe is also linked down below. Make it for somebody that you care about. That is yummy.