Vegan raw carrot cake

Uh oh- my first post since Memorial Day is a Father’s Day recipe! Please pardon my recent reticence: I’m cleaning out my dad’s house of 25 years before I move across the country, and it’s taking over my life. I pretty much spent the entire day today with china dishes:  locating and moving boxes of dishes, unpacking, sorting, matching, washing, drying, and re-packing. Yikes! I already sent an email to some of my girl friends with a bit of advice, based on my newly minted authority: don’t let people give you a 1000 sets of dishes for your wedding. (Weddings and deaths are the origins of my current china-inundation, and we can’t quite do anything about the dying part). Your kids (in my case, daughter) will end of sorting through them and cultivating a hatred for fancy, fragile things.

Anyway, I wanted to share the vegan, raw carrot cake that I made for Father’s Day. Because even though I’m swimming in china, I still love my dad.

So pretty. Damn the terrible lighting in this photo!! I stumbled upon this phenomenal vegan/raw blog while searching for a vegan/raw cheesecake recipe. (And then ended up going the carrot cake route). The blog is: http://www.thisrawsomeveganlife.com/

And while I’m not vegan or raw, I do try to do most of my baking/sweet-treat-making as vegan as possible. I am completely mesmerized by some of the recipes on this blog (see the peanut-butter chocolate cake one). My main conclusion from sifting through the recipes  from This Rawsome Vegan Life and my own vegan experiences is that dates actually are god’s gift to earth.

Regardless of your feelings about or faith in dates, they play an invaluable role in this cheesecake recipe. As do cashews, about which I also feel very strongly. (I espoused the virtues of cashews in a previous post).

My dad hasn’t given me any feedback about the cake, but I loved it. (Ray was not a huge fan, but we have pretty different dessert-tastes). There are a million ways the recipe could be personalized, and maybe I’ll try that next time to get a more enthusiastic response out of Ray.

Here’s the recipe:

Frosting Ingredients

2 cups cashews, soaked

1-2 Tbsp lemon juice

2 Tbsp coconut oil, melted so its liquid-y

1/3 cup maple syrup

water, as much as needed

Cake Ingredients

2 lg carrots, peeled and diced

1 1/2 cups oat flour (just process oats until they look flour-y)

2 cups dates, pitted and diced

1/2 cup dried coconut

1/2 tsp cinnamon

Method (Frosting)

combine all frosting ingredients in food processor and process, adding as little water as possible to reach a creamy, smooth consistency. Set aside.

Method (Cake)

combine all ingredients in food processor, and process  until everything is chopped up really small and sticks together.

press 1/2 the cake mixture into a small pan. spread 1/3 of the frosting over the top. freeze cake until frosting layer is hard. then press on the rest of the cake mixture and put it in the fridge overnight. then you can use the remaining frosting to frost the whole cake. Em (author of the blog) suggests toppings of walnuts and pistachios, both of which I had on hand and used. The cake was gorgeous and delicious, and best of all, didn’t make me feel grossly full and kind of disgusting most regular cake does.

I can’t wait to try some of Em’s other dessert recipes. Look for more to come this summer!