Baby carrot and fruit cake

(egg-free, dairy-free, nut-free, artificial sugar-free)

(serves 10 to 12)

Adapted from Belinda Jeffery

This is a solid but moist cake that we decided to trial for our little girl's birthday cake. She actually has no allergies (praise God!), but we do know a few kids that do so we thought it would be good to have a healthy cake up our sleeves. It is somewhere between a carrot cake and a fruit cake, and is surprisingly tasty and sweet and holds its shape really well despite everything it doesn't have in it! We decided to add the cream cheese icing for our little girl's cake because, well, what's a cake without icing?! But if we were making it for a regular snack or needed to be dairy-free then it's still pretty good without icing.

Prep time: 40 minutes (longer without a food processor)
Cooking time: 1 hour

Ingredients
1 cup (150g) plain flour
1 1/2 cups (240g) wholemeal plain flour
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground ginger
80 g raisins (or mixed dried fruit)
600 g carrots
300 g honey
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
90mL freshly squeezed orange juice
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup (60ml) light olive oil
1/2 cup (125g) crushed pineapple in natural juice

Honey and cream cheese icing (optional) [double if you want to do a middle layer]

250 g cream cheese
1/4 cup (90g) clear honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
fresh fruit, to serve

Method 

1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Lightly oil a non-stick cake tin and line the base with baking paper.

2. Put the plain flour, wholemeal flour, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, mixed spice, nutmeg and ginger in a large bowl. Whisk together for one minute. Add the dried fruit and toss until they're well coated in the flour mixture.

3. Peel the carrots and finely grate them with a food processor.

NB. Using a food processor will save you about 20 minutes of time. We used the fine grating option on the food processor, then also used chopped it smaller.

4. If your honey is thick, warm it gently to make it runny. Pour it into a large mixing bowl and stir in the orange zest and juice, vanilla extract, oil and crushed pineapple. Add the carrots and thoroughly mix everything together.

5. Add the flour mixture to the bowl and stir everything together until it's well combined, ending up with quite a stiff batter. Pour into the cake tin and bake for 50 to 60 minutes or until a fine skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. 

6. Let the cake cool in the tin for about 10 minutes, then carefully loosen it around the edges and gently turn it out onto the rack to cool completely, then re-invert it so it can cool right side up.

7. If you're making the icing, use the food processor fitted with a steel blade and blend the cream cheese, honey and vanilla extract until it's smooth and creamy. Scrape the icing into a bowl and keep it cool until you're ready to ice the cake. 

8. Gently swoosh the icing on top of the cake and top with berries or flaked coconut.

Hubby bringing out the cake, then setting the candle on fire with a blow-torch!
Our little girl enjoying everyone singing 'Happy Birthday' to her!

Blowing out the candle together, then little miss trying some cake - straight in!