Spicy Carrot Cake (egg, and nut free**)

This is such a delicious egg free cake recipe. I have made it sooooo many times already and everyone loves it. In fact because it is so delicious and I have no self  control this cake has been relegated to special occasion only (that is occasions when I will have to share it between lots of family snd friends) or else I would eat it all by my self and that is just not going to make my already tortured-stretched to within an inch of their lives-pants happy.

**The actual carrot cake recipe is dairy free however because we dont have any dairy allergies in the family I use a cream cheese icing (pictured) and this is NOT dairy free.

Spicy carrot cake

From – one bowl, allergy free baking

Linda Bosnic

Ingredients:

Dry

2 cups self raising flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon nutmeg

½ cup caster sugar

1 medium carrot, grated

Wet

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 cup soy milk

Preheat oven to 180˚ Celsius and grease and line a 20cm cake tin with non-stick baking paper.

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl

Make a well in the centre of dry ingredients and add wet ingredients

Mix together until they form a batter (not too much mixing)

Pour into prepared cake tin and bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into cake comes out clean.

Cool in cake tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto wire rack.

Icing:

For some reason icing has never been my friend and I have struggled to make decent icing more so than egg free cakes. Possibly one of the reasons is that I never measure things out, I think all my measuring patience is used up in the cake baking process and by the time I get to the icing I’m really just throwing anything together.

This sortof not really a recipe works well for this cake though and so far it hasn’t failed me.

Ingredients:

1 block of philidelphia Cheese (cut into smaller chunks-hmmm nice technical term)

Icing sugar

Lemon juice

Place Philidelphia cheese in a mixing bowl and mix on medium to high until cheese is soft (be careful not to over mix as I have found this makes the cheese runny and no amount of icing sugar of refridgeration will fix this, at least that’s what I found)

Add icing and lemon juice to taste an continue mixing until soft peaks form. 

Egg free, Nut free, Dairy free Banana Bread

This recipe also has the added bonus of being *fat free* for those who are interested in counting their calories that is.

I am not a particularly good cook (though I desperately wish I was), never clean as i go, tend to use almost every utensil in the house and more often than I would like to admit have to add as I serve "If it's really bad we can have toast."

We eat a lot of toast.

However I LOVE cookbooks, LOVE reading food blogs and watching any sort of cooking show. It's just obviously never really absorbed......
My son also has Egg and Nut allergies and I'm always scouring for new egg free, nut free recipes.
So in the interest of giving back I thought I would share a few of our families favourite recipes.

This Banana Bread recipe is super easy, so easy you can complete the entire process with a babe in arms and a toddler dangling precariously from the furniture and still end up with something edible (but a rather disastrously messy kitchen).  I did attempt to photograph the process as that's really the best part about reading a recipe but the photos I took somehow managed to make the most basic recipe really ugly and could possibly turn you off an otherwise delicious dish.

It does look a little sad I know but I also forgot to take a photo once it came out of the oven,  we were all too eager to eat it.

Banana Bread


Ingredients:


5 or 6 large Bananas
2 cups plain flour
1 cup of caster sugar *see note
1 Teaspoon Baking powder
1 Teaspoon Baking soda
Cinnamon to taste (we use a lot)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Method


Preheat oven to 180C.

Prepare small loaf tin.

Mash bananas, sugar and vanilla essence in a large bowl until quite liquidy (i don't think thats a real word) sift in remaining ingredients, mix until well combined pour into prepared loaf pan. Place in preheated oven and cook for 1 hour.
Enjoy!

*note: I have a hugely sweet tooth and would never normally say no to sugar but I normally only add about a half to 3/4 cup of sugar.

This recipe was given to me by my Sister-in-law. I'm not sure of it's original source.