The most delicious carrot cake you’ll ever encounter – vegan and gluten free carrot crumble slice

Hey there!

Soon the season of peaches, berries and apricots is going to be over so no more fruit peach crumbles, berry tarts or apricot cakes. But luckily there is this one vegetable, which surely always creates the perfect base for a delicious cake and it is even available all year long. There are tons of different versions of the cakes prepared with the long orange root veggie, there is even a recipe the regions I live in takes credits for. Yet sometimes a cake is just a bit too fancy to bring for coffee and tea plus it is also kind of hard to carry from one place to another when you haven’t got the right Tupperware available. So why don’t just create a delicious slice using similar flavours as in a traditional carrot cake, don’t slices make life a hell of a lot easier? The slice culture is actually something I encountered in Australia. Swiss people don’t actually tend to eat slices. We either eat round cakes, cakes out of a loaf tin and if we have a slice it is mostly a brownie, which is technically something else. I am actually not even sure if the rest of the English-speaking world calls this type of cake a slice as well but we’re just going to go with it. I mean you can see the pictures so I guess you get what I mean.

Anyways enough unnecessary talk about different types of cake shapes and let’s get going with the real talk.

So I guess by now you would have realised that I am talking about carrot cake or in today’s case about a carrot slice. Though I obviously didn’t just want to keep this ordinary and smother it with the usual frosting or glaze I decided to have a try at creating a carrot crumble slice instead of that.

I also kept this recipe completely vegan and gluten and refined sugar free. I decided to use agave for the batter and coconut sugar for the crumble. You can definitely substitute any other liquid sweetener such as maple syrup or honey. For the crumble I do recommend to stick with some for of crystallised sweetener so if you haven’t got any coconut sugar available you should probably just use ordinary sugar. But I honestly don’t know maybe you could also use a liquid sweetener in the crumble you could totally give it a go but it is not my fault if it doesn’t end up working out.

So now the recipe to this delicacy:

Cake batter:

• 2 carrots (mine weighed 130g)
• 50g almond meal
• 50g buckwheat flour
• 90g agave (can be substituted with maple syrup or honey)
• 30g almond butter
• 30g raisins
• 100ml almond milk
• ½ tsp vanilla paste
  ½ tsp cinnamon
• 1tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp ground cloves
• a pinch of nut meg

Crumble:

• 20g coconut oil (preferably slightly softened)
• 20g millet flakes (if you haven’t got millet flakes you can use oats, if necessary gluten-free ones)
• 20g chopped almonds
• 20g coconut sugar (can be substituted with ordinary sugar or cane sugar)
• ½ tsp cinnamon

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C
2. Finely grate your carrots.
3. Into a mixing bowl add the grated carrots, buckwheat flour, almond meal, agave, cinnamon, baking powder, ground cloves, nut meg and almond butter also pour in the almond milk.
4. Mix your batter until well combined..
5. Pour into a square shaped lined baking tin.
6. For the crumble add coconut oil, millet flakes, chopped almonds, coconut sugar and cinnamon into a bowl and crumble it up with your fingers until all the ingredients are well combined. It shouldn’t quite form a dough but the mixture should be slightly sticky.
7. Evenly crumble the millet almond mixture over the cake batter. Now bake at 180 °C for 20 minutes or until a toothpick stuck into the middle comes out clean.
8. After 20 minutes remove it from the oven, let it cool down completely and then slice your cake into squares. I went for fairly big slices so I got 9 out of this amount of cake though you could totally make your slices a bit smaller.

Voila you just created the most epic tasting carrot slice/version of a carrot cake you’ll ever be going to taste. Oh my, this just tasted heavenly and you would honestly never ever think that this was vegan, gluten-free and refined sugar free. The crumble is slightly crunchy and deliciously sweet. The cake it self is nicely moist yet still fluffy. And then the spices there’s just the right amount of cinnamon, ground cloves and nutmeg which forms this delightful couple with the slightly plump raisins and our star of the show the handy dandy carrots you can use in so many different ways.

So the next time you’re invited for afternoon tea make this. The next time you’ve got to bake for a baking sale, make this. The next time you’re craving cake, make this, you have got to, trust me!

Bisous