By Carrot Cake
I love how this recipe starts: “Make yourself a nice cup of tea. Since you have a kettle full of hot water anyway, soak your dried fruit in a cup of it.”
Nothing wrong with starting off cooking with some tea!
While the currants and golden raisins are soaking in hot water, a bunch of carrots are grated and butter, sugar, and eggs are creamed together. The carrots get added to this mixture.
Separately, the dry ingredients are mixed together (whole wheat flour, baking powder, salt, and a few different spices).
The soaked fruit is drained and added to the flour mixture, tossing to fully coat the fruit before the carrot mixture is added as well.
Once everything is combined, the batter is poured into a buttered pan (or pans) and cooked in the oven until a toothpick comes out clean.
The recipe actually suggests you bake this cake in a half dozen ramekins, but they weren’t clear on what size ramekins which is important for cooking times, so I didn’t want to risk it.
Though the author claims this cake is more dense, less sweet, and spicier than typical carrot cake, I really didn’t notice a difference from other homemade carrot cakes except that the icing was obviously missing. If you compare to store-bought cakes, though, then it is more dense.
Taste: 10/10
This is really good! Especially with tea or coffee. And while there is sugar and butter in the recipe, they use a lot less of it than usual and replaced regular flour with whole wheat, so it’s a bit healthier than a typical carrot cake.
Difficulty: Average
It does take a lot of time and some muscle to grate all of those darn carrots, but after that the recipe is mostly just mixing things together.
Cost: Average
You’ll need to purchase carrots, currants, and golden raisins for sure. Other ingredients include whole wheat flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and cloves. Also, they don’t tell you how many carrots to grate, just that you’ll need 3.5 cups of grated carrot, so it can be a bit of a challenge to eyeball how many that is. I ended up using about 3-4 carrots, and had two leftover.
This Geek Loves Food 