Nothing compares baking your own carrot cake once you have nailed the recipe. I went down to my local bakery to grab some afternoon tea during the work week and I thought to try their carrot cake. It tasted like there was unnecessarily a lot of cream and white sugar. The carrot cake I usually make is soft, moist and not too sweet, with a delicious malty like flavour when you have it with a cup of tea. My recipe is a modification of a Donna Hay recipe (for some reason I found her original recipe a little dry so I made my changes to it).
One day, I made a carrot cake to take with me during a farm tour with a few chefs of Sydney restaurants and it was a long bus ride so I pulled out my carrot cake loaf and offered them around (yes I know it was brave offering my humble carrot cake of this amateur homecook to a bunch of Sydney chefs). Unexpectedly, I received a “This is really good” thumbs up which made my day. I also gave it to one of my friends, a café owner, one day to try and she and her chef loved it too!
Since then though, I revamped the recipe a little to add a healthier wholefood ingredient like hemp seed after a nutrition course at the Billabong retreat and it still is soft, moist and not too sweet and awesome with a cup of tea, but a little healthier for you. Try it and let me know how it turned out!
Here’s my revamped carrot cake recipe.
Ingredients
1 ¼ cups coconut sugar
¾ cup coconut oil (melted)
3 eggs
1 ½ cups of Whitewings Wholseome blend of wheat, coconut, oat and millet plain flour or you can use organic unbleached plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
2 ½ cups grated carrot
½ cup chopped walnuts
3 teaspoons hemp seeds
½ cup sultanas
1/2 cup almond & coconut milk (I used Drink Bruce, you can just use plain almond milk. Also use your judgement on how much almond milk to use – the batter should be thick and moist so it slowly pours in the baking tin. You don’t want the batter too runny. If you grate your own carrots (as opposed to prepared grated carrots, the 1/2 cup almond milk is fine but if you use prepared grated carrots you buy in packets, you need more moisture and I needed somewhere between 1/2 a cup plus a splash of almond milk to get the consistency I am after)
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius fan forced.
- Place the coconut sugar and coconut oil (melted) in a bowl of electric mixer and beat for 2-3 minutes.
- Add eggs gradually and beat well.
- Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and ginger over the sugar mixture.
- Add the carrot, walnuts, hemp seeds and sultana and mix until just combined.
- Pour the mixture into a cake tin and line it with baking paper (shape it so it lines the whole tin so you don’t need to grease the tin).
- Bake for 55 minutes. Turn off the oven and let it sit for another 5 minutes.
- Enjoy!
