Happy birthday!

To Mr Bite!

For the second time in his lifetime, Mr Bite's birthday fell on Easter Sunday. With our return from holiday the  day before, we have scheduled his main family birthday celebrations for next weekend, allowing yesterday to be a birthday-focused but quite relaxing day.

We briefly visited both of our families, went for a leisurely walk on a shady stretch of Perth's Swan River, ate birthday carrot cake (a prelude to the 'real' birthday cake of next weekend, which will involve plenty of chocolate...), and had Grill'd burgers for dinner.

Swan River, North Fremantle

Uniced carrot cake, slightly sunk because I checked it 10 minutes before it was cooked...

...fortunately quite easy to cover up.

Grill'd 'Field of Dreams' vegetarian mushroom burger - still my favourite

I made the carrot cake yesterday, with the recipe adapted from Kris Holecheck's The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes. This has become my 'go to' baking book when I need something quickly and, as a bonus, all I needed to buy yesterday were fresh carrots and soy cream cheese. The other ingredients are things I always have on hand, something I find extremely helpful for cake recipes.

This cake also highlights how 'vegan' doesn't have to be obvious or detectable. It tasted like soft, moist carrot cake. I don't even know if Mr Bite knew it was vegan. The fact that it is easy and can be made and baked in well under an hour - even with the carrot grating - is a bonus.

Carrot cake with cream cheese icing

Adapted from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes (Kris Holechek)

Vegan

Makes 1 square cake

Print recipe

Ingredients

For the carrot cake

2 1/2 cups plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp mixed spice

1/2 - 1 tsp cinnamon (I used 1/2 tsp)

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup oil

1 cup apple sauce

1/3 cup non-dairy milk, or milk of choice (I used soy)

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

3 large carrots, grated

1/3 cup sultanas (small raisins)

For the icing

125g soy cream cheese

1 tbsp non-dairy spread, margarine or butter

1 cup icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Method

Preheat the oven to 180'C and prepare a square baking tin.

Combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, mixed spice, cinnamon, ginger, salt) in a small bowl.

Combine the brown sugar, white sugar and oil in a large bowl. Add the apple sauce, milk, vanilla and carrots and mix well. Add in the dry ingredients gradually, stirring to combine. Add the sultanas and stir through.

Bake for 30 minutes until golden and a toothpick comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 - 20 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

To make the icing, beat the cream cheese, non-dairy spread, icing sugar and vanilla until smooth.

Optionally top with Lindt Easter carrot chocolates.

I can see myself making this again when wanting an easy carrot cake. You could also, of course, include nuts (the original recipe called for walnuts) but Mr Bite isn't a fan and so I left them out.

Having Mr Bite's birthday fall yesterday allowed me to almost skip over Easter this year, something that didn't bother me in the slightest. My excitement at his birthday was definitely greater than any excitement I experience for Easter, and I am looking forward to continuing to celebrate over the week. It's one of the oddities of age that whilst one's own birthday gets less exciting with time, the anticipation and happiness I feel when celebrating others' birthdays (particularly the others who are more important to me than words can really express) continues to increase.

Despite this, we did end up with quite a lot of Easter chocolate, including some Guylian and Lindt small Easter eggs, and some non-Easter chilli chocolate that I am looking forward to reviewing another time.

In the mean time - Happy Easter / Passover to those who do celebrate it, and happy long weekend to everyone else here in Australia!

Do you have a 'go to' carrot cake recipe? It's one of my favourite cakes and yet all the versions I usually make are hybrids that involve pineapple, thus making them not quite carrot cake at all!

Tweet

Pin It