Carrot Cake
Honey-sweetened carrot cake. More rustic than some, but delicious and moist. The cake is fairly sweet, so the frosting is deliberately not too sweet.
Servings Prep Time
19″ 2 layer cake 2hours
Servings Prep Time
19″ 2 layer cake 2hours
Ingredients
Prepare and set aside:
  • 3C finely grated carrot
  • .5C golden raisinsor try chopped dried apricots!
  • 1C chopped pecans
Sift and set aside:
  • 2C flourall-purpose or cake flour
  • 2t cinnamon
  • 2t baking powder
  • 2t baking soda
  • 1t salt
  • .25t mace(the outside of the nutmeg)
Wet Ingredients
  • 4eggs room tempbring eggs to temp in warm water, if required.
  • 1C melted buttersubstitute cooking oil for dairy-free
  • 1.25C warm honeyHoney *must* be warm, but not hot
Instructions
Before you start:
  1. Grate the carrots using a fine setting. Preheat oven to 250.
  2. Chop the pecans — large pieces will make cutting the cake hard, but you do want to know there are nuts in it.
  3. Sift together the dry ingredients and set aside.
  4. Grease and flour two 8″ or 9″ cake rounds.
  5. Preheat oven to 350.
Prepare batter
  1. Beat room-temp eggs for 1 minute, until fluffy, then add butter.
  2. Beat warm honey in for 3 minutes, until very light and fluffy.
  3. When the wet ingredients have been beaten they should be fluffy and have doubled or tripled in volume.
  4. Lightly fold 1/3 of dry ingredients into wet ingredients. Repeat with remaining thirds. When lumps are mostly gone, fold in the carrots, raisins and pecans.
Baking
  1. Spoon into pans gently, smooth surface and bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean and the top is springy.
  2. Let cool in pan for 15 minutes, then turn onto rack and cool completely.
  3. Split each layer in two and fill with cream cheese frosting. Use a very small amount between layers (2-4T) and the rest to frost the cake.