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Vegan Carrot Cake Clio’s Style

And it’s not that much work!! After playing with the recipe I purloined from www.lovingitvegan.com I came up with a vegan carrot cake *Clio’s style. If you have a special celebration coming up where you need to bring something, this is the something to bring. Plus the added benefit, you’ll probably be invited back 🙂

Vegan Carrot Cake Clio’s Style Ingredients

Serves: 10

Prep time: 30 minutes

Cook time: 30 min  Oven 350

  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking Soda
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  • ¼ tsp ground ginger
  • 2 ⅓ cups grated carrots
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • ½ RealFoodDate Sugar
  • 2 flax eggs (2 tbsp Flaxseed meal with 6 tbsp water)
  • ½ cup canola oil
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
  • 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
  • ½ cup raisins (optional)

Lemon Buttercream Frosting Ingredients

Frosts 2 layer cake

  • 3 ¾ cups powdered confectious sugar
  • 3 tbsp Vegan butter
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 tsp apple cider vinegar
  • 3-4 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Vegan Carrot Cake Clio’s Style Recipe

Preheat the oven 350 degrees.

  1. Grease two 8 inch cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment paper.
  2. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger into a large mixing bowl.
  3. Add the grated carrot and sugars.
  4. Prepare flax eggs, by mixing 2 tbsp flaxseed meal with 6 tbsp water and allow to sit for a minute.
  5. In the meantime, add the oil, vanilla and apple cider vinegar to the mixing bowl.
  6. Add the flax eggs.
  7. Mix everything together with spatula. Have a little patience and letter batter sit for a minute or two so that the carrots can release more water into the batter to enable you to mix all together.
  8. If your batter is still too dry to mix after letting it sit, then add a little non-dairy milk, only as much as you need to get the batter to a wet enough consistency so that it can mix properly.
  9. Lastly add chopped walnuts and raisins if you want.
  10. Divide the mixture between the two 8-inch cake pans.
  11. Place into the oven and bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
  12. Allow the cakes to cool completely on a cooling rack.
  13. While cakes are cooling, prepare your frosting.
( I can’t resist a pretty little thrift store plate! )

Lemon Buttercream Frosting Recipe

  1. Add the powdered sugar, *vegan butter, vanilla, apple cider vinegar, and 3 tbsp of lemon juice to an electric mixer bowl.
  2. Start mixing on low speed.
  3. If your frosting is too thick add in more lemon juice a drop at a time as needed to get your frosting mix to the perfect consistency. If it’s too thin, add a little more powdered sugar.
  4. Turn cakes over, so the smooth side gets frosted.
  5. Add frosting to the top on one of the layers.
  6. Put the second layer of cake on top of the first and complete frosting of the top and sides of the cake.
  7. Sprinkle crushed walnuts and serve.

Okay, so what’s up with this *Clio Style? I’ve gotten in the habit of taking recipes and adapting the ingredients to be the healthiest they can be. For instance the original recipe for this cake called for two cups All-Purpose White flour. For the life of me, I couldn’t do it, so I halved from two cups of All-Purpose Flour, to one cup each of the white, and one cup of the Whole Wheat. Regarding the sugars; I replaced ½ cup of the brown sugar with the RealFoodDateSugar. The last time I made this carrot cake, not one person said it wasn’t sweet enough.

Unfortunately, good frosting needs all that powdered sugar. No complaints there… I like to think these little tweaks here and there add up. And it’s fun experimenting. There have been some failures in this department; homemade graham crackers need sugar, as Peter (whose birthday is today and who is the recipient of the cake) will attest to. Those graham crackers I made during my natural food craze of the 80’s are still referred to today. “Remember the time Mom tried to make her own ‘healthy’ graham crackers?”

Or even two nights ago, when I destroyed our Tuscan Bean Soup when I added a handful whole-wheat pasta rotini to add a little bulk, which it didn’t need. You know that little voice that says, “Don’t do it.” well, I did it…and turned a beautiful brothy soup I had been working on all day, into a god-awful glop requiring either a fork or a large spoon to eat.

Bless Rick, he’ll eat anything and is eating the leftovers right now as I write. 🙂

He just asked me since I’m writing about my epic fails, if I’m including the stir fry trout incident..even though it was years ago, it is still very fresh in his mind. I’ll spare you guys that one. But, if you haven’t read my blog, Earth Shoes, Abalone and Me, you’ll be amazed at how far I’ve come and the sweet fact that the marriage endured.

Ciao for now 🙂

P.S. Well, I wonder if it was all the talk of “fail”? …Peter’s birthday cake is cool and ready to be frosted. I don’t know why all of a sudden I got in a hurry and didn’t follow my own instructions on the frosting. When a recipe tells you, if your frosting is too thick, add the lemon juice, “one drop at a time” until its consistency is right. Do it! I poured in all at once, about another tablespoon of the juice. And what was supposed to be three teaspoons of apple cider vinegar, for some crazy reason, I read three tablespoons. My Lemon Buttercream frosting turned into Lemon Buttercream soup 🙁 Right now it’s in the fridge chilling after I added another half box of powdered sugar and one more tablespoon of vegan butter. In my mind’s eye, it was going to be perfect and really cool. I had a brilliant idea to put a peace symbol in walnuts along the edges of the top. And he was going to say, “Mom, you’re the best.”

P.S.S. Regarding the stir fried fish; I distinctly remember asking Rick if the fish had been cleaned. And of course he said, yes. I didn’t have a Dad who brought home freshly caught fish, and I, not to my knowledge, had ever eaten trout. Also, these were the wok years, when everything was stir fried. Everything! As I looked at those two fish, I thought he must have somehow slipped the bones out. This dinner ended up being walked out and buried in my food graveyard along the back fence. I overheard Rick say to Peter, “We’re having a treat tonight; cereal for dinner.”

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