This is a honey-sweetened carrot cake recipe my mother created for my stepdad when he gave up all refined sugar. That was in the early 1980’s long before it was fashionable, but his family history of heart disease led him to develop what remains a very modern dietary response. He has since eliminated honey and other high-glucose sweeteners.
Use Cream Cheese Icing to frost this cake.
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: 1 9" 2 layer cake
Ingredients
Prepare and set aside:
- 3 C finely grated carrot
- .5 C golden raisins or try chopped dried apricots!
- 1 C chopped pecans
Sift and set aside:
- 2 C flour all-purpose or cake flour
- 2 t cinnamon
- 2 t baking powder
- 2 t baking soda
- 1 t salt
- .25 t mace (the outside of the nutmeg)
Wet Ingredients
- 4 eggs room temp bring eggs to temp in warm water, if required.
- 1 C melted butter substitute cooking oil for dairy-free
- 1.25 C warm honey Honey *must* be warm, but not hot
Instructions
Before you start:
- Grate the carrots using a fine setting. Preheat oven to 250.
- Chop the pecans -- large pieces will make cutting the cake hard, but you do want to know there are nuts in it.
- Sift together the dry ingredients and set aside.
- Grease and flour two 8" or 9" cake rounds.
- Preheat oven to 350.
Prepare batter
- Beat room-temp eggs for 1 minute, until fluffy, then add butter.
- Beat warm honey in for 3 minutes, until very light and fluffy.
- When the wet ingredients have been beaten they should be fluffy and have doubled or tripled in volume.
- 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
- 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.
- Let cool in pan for 15 minutes, then turn onto rack and cool completely.
- 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.