Paleo Carrot Cake: Cavemen Deserve Treats Too

To treat myself for making it through four weeks of Paleo eating I whipped up a little Paleo Carrot Cake on the weekend.

It really didn't hold a candle to my favourite ever carrot cake at Bourke st Bakery in Sydney, but for a Paleo interpretation it was pretty good.

I started off with a recipe from Make It Paleo, but adapted it and reduced some of the quantities when I realised that their carrot cake probably cost $40 in ingredients... Here's my interpretation.

Alecia's Paleo Carrot Cake

3 carrots, grated

3/4 cup pure maple syrup

3/4 cup coconut flour

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

15 pitted dates

5 eggs

2 tbsp vanilla essence

1/2 cup melted coconut oil

small tub of cream cheese

1 tsp ground ginger

a few walnuts to garnish

1) In a bowl, pour 1/2 cup of maple syrup and 1/4 cup water over grated carrots and pop in the fridge for an hour.

2) In a mixmaster bowl, combine sifted coconut flour cinnamon, salt and baking soda.

3) In a microwave safe bowl, add 1/4 cup water to the pitted dates and microwave for 30 seconds. Mash the mixture with a fork and then microwave for another 30 seconds and then mash again.

4) Add the mashed date mix to the flour mixture, and then add eggs, vanilla and coconut oil. Mix well.

5) Remove bowl from mixer and add the maple syrup marinated carrots. Fold through.

6) Grease a round springform pan with coconut oil and pour in the batter.

7) Bake in a 175 degree (Celsius) oven for 35 mins or until your skewer comes out clean.

8) In a small bowl, combine the cream cheese with 1/4 cup maple syrup and the ground ginger, and then when cake has cooled, frost cake with cream cheese icing and garnish with smashed walnuts.

If you're used to massively sugary carrot cakes then this isn't going to cut the mustard - but if you've been living on meat, veggies and green smoothies for four weeks then this is actually pretty good.

If I was going to make it again and wasn't being so Paleo-strict, I'd add 1/2 cup self raising flour so that it would raise a little more, and a little bit of icing sugar to the cream cheese frosting because I found the paleo version borderline savoury - but otherwise it was delish. 

And since it was so god-damn healthy I didn't feel guilty polishing off a few slices to celebrate nothing really particular on a Sunday afternoon.

Macaroon Syrup Cake with Candied Orange Slices

One of my colleagues had a birthday this week - so I put my hand up to make a cake for our office morning tea.

I put my own spin on a family favourite - my Mum's Macaroon Syrup cake. I'm not sure where she originally got the recipe from but she's been making it for years and it always turns out fantastically.

I followed her "cake" recipe component below

Cake Ingredients

125g butter

1 cup caster sugar

4 eggs

2 cups coconut

1 cup self raising flour

Grease ring pan or line base and sides with baking paper.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy

Beat in eggs one by one very well

Stir in coconut and sifted flour

Spread mixture in pan

Bake in 160C oven for about 45 mins

Now my Mum always uses tinned mandarin segments to decorate the top of the cake and utilises the "juice" to make the syrup, but I tweaked it a little and made candied orange slices and syrup instead.

Syrup Ingredients
2 oranges
1 cup caster sugar
3 cups water
1 lemon

Slice oranges into 5mm slices (I left the rind on)
Add 1 1/2 cups of water and 1/2 cup caster sugar to pan and heat until water boils and sugar dissolves
Add orange slices to pan, bring to boil and then turn down to simmer until the liquid reduces (approx 15 mins)
Remove slices from pan and place on sheet of baking paper
Add remaining 1 1/2 cups water and 1/2 cup caster sugar to pan with two lemon wedges and simmer for 10 minutes

At this point remove the cake from the oven (do not remove from the tin), and pour the hot syrup over the hot cake. (Every time I do this I always think I have too much liquid and I'm going to drown the cake - but trust me, it soaks it up like a sponge.)

(Yes I made a mini cake in a ramekin for Mr Tchotchke)

Let the cake cool before you remove it from the tin. Arrange the candied orange slices around the top of the cake.

Yum - it's a relatively cheap and easy cake to make and always seems to impress people with how moist and delicious it is. If only our citrus trees started producing I'd be making it more often!

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Two gorgeous friends of mine just got engaged - so we caught up for dinner to celebrate and I decided to make a cake for the occasion.

Inspired by this recipe over at The Cake Mistress I decided to bake a Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. Here's what the final result looked like.

But of course it started out with carrots and walnuts. It was my first attempt at a carrot cake and I was slightly surprised at how much carrot went into it (4 big carrots!).

Not exactly the prettiest "before" photo..

But hey it turned out of the ring pan in one piece which is always a win.

To be honest I struggled with the frosting again (what is it with me and frosting?) it was a weird consistency - it seemed to be slightly separated with the icing sugar particles almost suspended in the icing? I think next time I'll try it with Philadelphia cream cheese instead of the Dairy Farmers Cottage Cheese I used.

But despite my complaints on the frosting - it was happily gobbled up! Congratulations again M & T!!

The Teepee Cake Challenge: COMPLETED

So - last week I posted here about the impending Teepee cake challenge - and it all came to fruition this weekend.

I was concerned that it was my first time making a cake in a Dolly Varden tin so I made the cake the evening before hand so I'd have ample time to rectify any cake disasters.

Out came the KitchenAid to beat the orange and poppyseed batter into submission.

And I was somewhat concerned that I still didn't have enough - it barely filled the cake tin to the halfway mark.

But it rose incredibly in the oven - and thankfully didn't deflate into itself like I'd read about.

The next morning I whipped up a batch of Buttercream Icing using this recipe. (hmm I may sound casual now but I was fretting by that point - icing is not my friend - especially after the icing on my last Martha Stewart Lemon Cake didn't do so well in the heat.) 

On my first attempt at the icing it was so soft - almost the texture of raw cake batter - so I popped the bowl in the fridge to chill and hopefully firm up. But on my return the icing had stiffened up to a hard ice-cream like consistency which gave me a good fright - but after another go in the KitchenAid it was good to go.

I covered a chopping board in green wrapping paper and used grissini bread sticks for the wooden posts.

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find cowboys and indians figurines. I couldn't find them anywhere on the weekend and was kicking myself for not being more organised and ordering some online. Mr Tchotchke saved the day and found a pack of farmyard figurines that did the job just fine.

The crowd of kids at the party swarmed around it as if that miniature horse was real.

I think it was a hit.

The Teepee Cake Challenge

It's my darling goddaughter's first birthday party on Sunday - and I've put my hand up to make her a birthday cake.

And since it's a Cowboys and Indians party - I'll be making a Teepee cake!

So of course I've borrowed my mum's well thumbed copy of the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.

Because from years of flicking through the pages and ogling all the elaborate designs - I knew that I'd find a Teepee cake amongst the bunnies and princesses.

Aw just as cute as I remembered.

A bit of further Google research has brought up these ones too..

This one is from That's My Cake.

And this one is from a book called 50 Easy Party Cakes by Debbie Brown.

So I've certainly got my work cut out for me... I'm not sure if I'm going to tackle the firm fondant icing - but I'm worried that regular icing will look dodgy if its a hot day... I'll let you know how I go!

Martha's Lemon Cake

Oh Martha - I do love how you're slightly mean to all the guests on your show because they can never make their Christmas decorations as perfectly as yours - but do you purposefully make your recipes hard to navigate so our cakes never outshine yours?


I had a stab at Martha Stewart's Lemon Cake on the weekend for my Mum's birthday. 

Which of course meant that I got to use my lovely KitchenAid mixer.

Which is a good thing since I'm trying to bring down it's cost per use in order to justify it's existence in our kitchen. Can you see the 67 point planetary action?

It makes great pizza dough, and it can even roll lasagne sheets - but no it unfortunately doesn't read the recipe for you and ensure that you've printed out all the applicable pages.

It was only when I'd cooked both cakes, made the frosting, candied the lemons and was about to layer one cake on top of the other that I read the line in her recipe that mentioned lemon curd - a hyper link recipe that I suppose I should have noticed, clicked, printed and cooked earlier.. but I think Martha had buried it in the opening descriptive paragraph to ensure that my cake would never be superior to hers.. Luckily I had a jar of marmalade in the fridge that served as a perfectly fine spread between the cake layers.

Nonetheless I was pretty happy with how it turned out. The whipped frosting gradually recoiled in horror at the heat of the afternoon, but the cake inside was lovely and nobody seemed to think the marmalade filling was strange. It even looked pretty similar to the one from the recipe. See Martha, your devious plan to outsmart me was foiled..