I’m a cake girl. I live for cake — dense, moist cakes with a very light or minimal frosting. Since going gluten free, I rarely get to indulge. Every once in a while I will pick up a gluten-free cupcake at our local farmer’s market, but even then the focus tends to be more on the frosting than the cake, which makes sense as frosting is naturally gluten-free and the cake has to be carefully re-created using a variety of flours to even remotely resemble the cake that we’re used to.

A trifle is the next best thing to cake. It is actually what I do when a cake flops — I just cut it into chunks, layer it in a trifle dish with frosting or whipped cream, and no one is the wiser!

Since making gluten free cake is such a process, I usually do without. But a few weeks ago, I got inspired and decided to use Udi’s chocolate chip muffins as a base for a trifle. The muffins are so sweet, they are practically cake. And I love the combination of whipped cream with chocolate. Frosting is often too rich for me, but the whipped cream creates the perfect juxtaposition of light and dark, fresh and rich.

Best of all, assembling this dessert together couldn’t be easier!

All I did to prepare was rinse the raspberries, whip up a bowl of sweetened whipped cream and cut up 2 containers of Udi’s chocolate chip muffins into large squares.

Then you line the bottom of the trifle bowl with chocolate muffin squares. (I think I only used 6 of the 8 muffins when all was said and done, but it really depends on the size of your trifle dish. You can also make individual trifles using sundae bowls or whatever you have on hand.)

Layer half the whipped cream on top of that, then half the raspberries on top of that.

And do it all again — a layer of chocolate muffin, a layer of whipped cream, and then raspberries on top!

It’s the perfect gluten-free summertime dessert!

Gluten-Free Chocolate Raspberry Trifle