I'm getting ready to try a Carrot Cake...

I got the recipe from Susan V's http://blog.fatfreevegan.com. I'm replacing a few things: I'm making a stevia tea with the 3/4 cup of warm water (done by boiling stevia in water and straining out) to replace the 1 1/2 cups of sugar in the cake. As a diabetic, the sugar does little for me.

I'm also trying some extra-ground (mortar and pestle) stevia crystals to replace the powdered sugar in the frosting. I'll tell you how it comes out in my next post.

Classic Vegan Carrot Cake

yields 2 8×8″ cakes (or 2 9″ round cakes)

2 1/3 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp salt

6 tbsp flax seed meal
3/4 c warm water
1½ c sugar
1 c oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 c shredded carrots
1 c walnuts, chopped

Cream Cheese Frosting
8 oz vegan cream cheese
¼ c margarine, softened
1 tsp vanilla
2 c powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350º. Line two 8×8″ pans with parchment paper. In a small bowl, sift together dry ingredients (flour through salt). In a large bowl, whisk together flax seed meal and water. Beat in sugar and oil. Add vanilla and carrots and mix until combined. Add dry mix and stir until moistened. Fold in walnuts. Pour equal parts into pans. Bake for 18-20 min, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in pans 10 minutes.

For the frosting, beat together cream cheese and margarine. Add vanilla and powdered sugar; whip until smooth. (Don’t overbeat; in my experience, store-bought vegan cream cheese has a tendency to get runny.)

Use a knife to loosen edges of cake from pans. Using parchment paper, lift cakes out of pans. Carefully remove parchment paper from one cake. Frost cake, layer, and decorate with a marzipan carrot (brush a little cocoa powder into the indents for some realism). Serve chilled.

CHANGES I MADE:

In the first recipe (Cake Part) I used the stevia water as I said earlier, plus a added a half a cup of erythritol powder ( a low calorie sweetener that does not effect blood sugar and is about 70% of the sweetness of cane sugar). In the Frosting Part I used 1 1/2 cups of erythritol powder instead of sugar, plus about 20 drops of Vanilla Cream stevia liquid to replace the vanilla.