Carrot Cake
Carrot cake is great. Its nice, and moist, and cakey. But it has a veneer of healthiness. After all, it has carrots! And. . theoretically less sugar!
Its cake. And veggies. And cake!
- 2 Whole Eggs
- 1/2 Cup Olive Oil or other vegetable oil
- 1 Cup Sugar
- 3 tbsp Pumpkin Puree or Applesauce
- 2 tbsp Molasses Blackstrap
- 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 1 Cup Flour do half all purpose, half whole wheat
- 1 tsp Baking Soda
- 1 tsp Baking Powder
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 2 tsp Cinnamon
- 1 tsp Nutmeg
- 2 Cups Carrots grated, or mashed
- Prepare your carrots. Finely grating them in fine, but so is cooking them down and mashing them. Put to the side.
- Beat your two eggs. Add in oil, sugar, pumpkin puree, molasses, and vanilla extract. Mix well.
- Mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in another bowl. Combine your wet and dry mixtures.
- Add carrots to your batter. Mix well. Pour the carroty mixture into a buttered 8x8 baking pan.
- Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about one hour. Make sure the cake is done by inserting a knife into the center; it should come out clean.
Its fairly common to cut the oil required in a carrot cake recipe with applesauce, but pumpkin puree works well too! Its especially practical if you've been cooking down a lot of pumpkin recently.
Blackstrap molasses actually tastes acceptable in this cake - possibly because it is not the main sweetener, it just gives the cake a nice brown color. You could probably also use brown sugar and no molasses.
This cake is good enough to be dessert for sure, especially if you ice it with cream cheese frosting. But I like to leave it plain and have it for breakfast with my morning coffee. Yum!
This looks really good so I will give it a try. Does it really only require 1 cup of flour?
Yup. You shouldn’t need more than 1 cup of flour. 🙂