Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

Ingredients (mine, not Ella’s)

• 400g buckwheat flour
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• Pinch of salt
• 200g dessicated coconut or coconut flour, or ground almonds
• 200g (ish) grape puree (or whatever you’re using)
• 100g raisins
• 600ml non-dairy milk (eg soy)
• 100g coconut oil
• 3 medium carrots grated

Icing

• 250g cashews soaked overnight
• 3-4 tbsp grape puree
• 2 tbsp non-dairy milk
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• Handful of toasted walnuts

Preheat the oven to around 200 C and line with baking parchment (another fave tool at Yoga Sutra Shala – saves your baking pans, and makes everything come out perfectly without using extra oil) 2 round cake tins, approx. 23cm in diameter (or whatever you have).

Mix together your dry ingredients, to remove lumps and to ensure they’re well combined.  Then add in your fruit puree, carrots, milk, raisins and (melted) coconut oil.  Stir until a batter has formed and all the dry ingredients are incorporated.

Pour half the batter into each of your cake tins and bung in the oven for around 35-40 mins (but do start checking earlier), until the knife comes out clean.  Remove from oven and allow to cool to room temperature in the tins.

Meanwhile, make the icing.  Blitz drained cashews with all the rest of the icing ingredients (except walnuts) in a food processor until smooth (pulse setting is particularly good here, if you have one).  Take one cake and remove from parchment and place on a plate.  Spread half your icing over it.  Then sandwich the second cake on top and spread the rest over the top of the cake.  It doesn’t need to look super smooth – its nice if it looks a bit homemade.  Then place your walnuts in any pattern you like on top of the icing. 

Serve with a cup of tea or coffee to much adoration from your guests (or just eat the whole thing yourself – I mean, it’s healthy, right?! Definitely at least 3 of your 5 a day)

 




 A note from our Chef Ruth :)

"This is a recipe I adapted from Deliciously Ella’s cookbook. 

Because we don’t use processed sugar of any sort at Yoga Sutra Shala, and at the time some of the ingredients weren’t available, I changed the recipe around but kept quantities more or less the same, except for the grape jam.

At the moment we have a huge abundance of grapes on our vines and we are picking them all and making jam, because they won’t last much longer. This is my favourite secret ingredient right now and I’m putting it in pretty much everything as a substitute for sugar.  Because of the sweetness of these grapes, I tend to use less in quantity, by around half than what recipes call for.  But taste test is always how you’ll determine if you have enough or not.  There’s no eggs, as its vegan, so no need to worry about uncooked cake mixtures.

However, most people don’t have vines on their balcony or garden, so this is a bit less feasible.  Although we call it ‘jam’ in reality its more a grape puree.  We roast the grapes until they start to caramelise and then we puree it.  We don’t add anything else which would traditionally make it a jam.  You can do this with any fruit really, especially sweeter ones.  So if you have something leftover that’s going a bit brown, starting to be a bit dodgy, just whack it in the oven for a while and then puree it in a blender.  With bananas you don’t even need to do this – you can just mash them up with a fork.  It’ll keep like this in jars, Tupperware or zip lock bags in your fridge for a couple of weeks.  You can even freeze it. 

This cake uses buckwheat which is a great flour.  It’s gluten free, and just very easy to use.  Whilst not all supermarkets stock it, an increasing number are, and you can easily find it organic too.  Because of the lack of eggs, bicarbonate of soda is needed in vegan cakes.  Go easy on it though, too much and it’ll ruin the taste of the cake.  I always err on slightly less than what’s said. 

The other thing I’d suggest is keep an eye on your cake when its in the oven.  All ovens are different and depending on where your flour is from and what processes its been through before it arrives with you, its going to cook quicker or slower than suggested.  I always start checking my cakes around 25-30 minutes in, just in case.  You just want to insert a knife and see if it comes out clean"