Healthier Carrot Cake – Less Calories, More Health and Taste
I fell in love with carrot cakes from the first moment I tried one some time ago. But this was still pretty late in my life – I was over 20!
I think that the idea of baking a cake with a vegetable was in Poland at least pretty foreign for many years ;-). But my obsession started when I tried an a m a z i n g carrot cake while I was in Monterey, California. The cake was incredible: moist, heavy but heavenly!
Since then I was on a search for the perfect recipe. I tried lots of different ones but was never completely satisfied. And then one day I decided to do it my way: healthier (wholemeal flour and addition of apples) and lighter (little sugar and low-fat cream cheese).
The result was incredible – my whole family agreed that my Healthier Carrot Cake was the best carrot cake I had ever baked!
P.S. If you don’t have to count calories, cut the baked and cooled down cake into two horizontal parts, double the amount of icing ingredients and use half of it to spread on one half of the cake.
Cover with the second half and spread the rest of the icing on top of the Healthier Carrot Cake.
P.P.S. And if you cannot decide which one is your favorite: a carrot or banana cake, how about trying a combination – Carrot and Banana Cake? 😉
Healthier Carrot Cake
Ingredients
Cake:
- 350 g carrots grated
- 150 g apples cut into small pieces
- 200 g wholemeal flour
- 80 g dark muscovado sugar
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp gingerbread spices (or mixture of equal amounts of ground cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves)
- 70 ml rapeseed oil
- 3 eggs
- 5 tbsp milk
- 50 g raisins
Icing:
- 100 g low-fat cream cheese
- 1 tbsp soft butter
- 1 cup icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Grease a 20-24 cm diameter round baking tin and put a greaseproof paper on the bottom of it.
- Preheat an oven to 180C.
- In a big bowl mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, gingerbread spices and cinnamon.
- In another bowl beat together the oil, eggs, milk and add to the dry ingredients, stir quickly only until everything is combined.
- Add the carrots, apples, raisins; stir again.
- Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 25-30 min. or until a wooden stick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. When baked, take it out from the oven.
- Let it rest for 10 min. in a baking tin and then on a wire rack until it cools completely.
- To make the icing, beat the cream cheese with butter till combined, add the icing sugar and vanilla.
- Spread the icing on top of the cold cake.
