I was hunting around for a vegan carrot cake recipe I might hack to use with buckwheat flour—I recently bought some, so I am keen to use it—when I suddenly wondered: what would a chocolate carrot cake taste like? Dianna Rattray seemed to think it would taste okay, so I started out from her recipe. Oh—I recently bought a juicer, and I love carrot juice, so I used the leftover carrot pulp, rather than grated carrot. The cake came out moist, heavy and mealy, with a rich chocolate taste. The carrot added to the texture, but I could hardly taste it at all.
How I made it:
- 1 cup carrot pulp
- ½ cup natural cane sugar (sucanat)
- 3 tbsp agave nectar (golden syrup will do)
- ½ cup olive oil (a lighter vegetable oil might be better)
- 1 cup Tesco exotic fruit juice (I needed to use it up!)
- 1½ cups buckwheat flour
- 1½ tsp baking powder (more might be in order—my cake did not rise very much)
- ½ cup cocoa powder
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp salt
Mix the carrots, sugar, syrup and oil in a mixing bowl. Pour on the boiling water and set aside.
In a separate bowl, sift the remaining ingredients together and combine. Add to the carrot mixture and mix thoroughly.
Spoon into a square or rectangular baking tin (I used a 7″x8″ flexible silicone baking tin), and bake in a pre-heated oven at 175°C (350°F) for 30–35 minutes. (I gave it 30 minutes at ~165°C in my fan oven.)
You can safely double the amount of carrot pulp, I think. This cake will probably keep best in the fridge. I made twenty pieces like the ones shown, and they go well warm with syrup, or cold and alone (sniff).
The TenthMaker 