GF Yellow Cake for Strawberry Shortcake

I love the internet for finding incredible recipes.  Usually I find a recipe, check out the comments, and then alter the recipe to my available ingredients.  A few family favourites are chocolate mousse made from tofu, and black bean brownies (google this and you get a variety of recipes).  The  newest in our house is a yellow cake that I found at allrecipes.com.  It's a lot like the white cake that my mom used to make for strawberry shortcake, with the perfect amount of bubbles for soaking up the strawberry juices and the right density to make it taste homemade.  This recipe calls for 2/3 cups of mayonnaise, and she had a great white cake recipe like that, too.  Maybe this is just a gluten-free version of the same.  

Thankfully, this is a cake I can make if I run out of my imported flours, because it calls for white rice flour and tapioca flour, 2 kinds that can easily be found on grocery store shelves for quite cheap here.  I did, however, add a bit of 'tropical' flour that made this yellow cake rather greeny-purple.  A strange combination, but it gives it a spice cake look.  The flour was purple sweet potato flour, and it is a very light flour that I find gives cakes a really nice lift.  Probably the 3 teaspoons of baking powder and 1 1/2 teaspoons of guar gum helped as well.

Today I used this cake as the base for a strawberry shortcake birthday cake, and it was a hit.  I love it when people say "is this gluten free???"  I mixed strawberries with a hand blender, mixed them to my already-mixed white icing (butter, icing powder, vanilla, milk), and then used this for layering the cake.  The outside topping was whipped cream and sliced fresh strawberries.  Yum!  This cake is moist enough that it stays intact when cut, which I find is unusual for most GF cake recipes.

A few years ago a friend and I decided that whenever we make things for events outside of our family, it's in our best interest to leave a few of the goodies behind for our loved ones (it only makes sense!), so I only used 3 of the 4 layers cut from the original 2 round cakes.  I cut the 4th layer in half and made half a cake that we'll eat tonight for dessert.    With the 4th layer this would be a really high layered cake, but it would be kind of neat to try!