Warren Brown

This gluten-free crust is inspired by the very popular gluten-free cakes we've baked at CakeLove for years. Here, I've added freshly ground golden flaxseeds, which add a wonderful, nutty aroma and taste to the dough. The rice flour lends sweetness, and millet is a good substitute for the starch component in flour, but it doesn't do much in the way of binding. That task is left to the tapioca and egg white, which help hold the dough together as you roll it out.

In Sicily, the long-ago homeland of immigrants who first brought cassata cake to America, the cake often has candied fruits, citrus liqueurs, and a glazing of marzipan.

I spent some time in Knoxville and got to know firsthand how pleasant the people are and how proud they are to maintain the tradition of the apple stack cake. Everyone knows it, and the routine that they follow to make and serve it is serious business. It's an unusual and labor-intensive cake. First of all, the dough is rolled out like a cookie. It bakes into a pretty hard disk that will get mildly saturated with dried apples reconstituted with spices and sugar. The apples can't be fresh, and cheating the drying process is not acceptable. Electric fruit dehydrators save the effort of sun-drying apples on the porch or rigging an elaborate clothesline system in the attic—all methods I was told about by people who have seen it done. One important element of the stack cake is timing. It must be wrapped and left in the refrigerator at least overnight, longer if possible. Whether you wrap it with wax paper and dish towels, aluminum foil, or plastic wrap, one way or another, keep it well covered so the moisture won't escape.

This is a delicious, very delicate cake. It's served for dessert everywhere in Charleston, but I like it as a morning cake or afternoon snack. The recipe was named for a small but influential group of French Protestants who fled persecution by their Catholic countrymen and settled lands that became South Carolina more than a century before the Revolutionary War.