The Best Vegan Carrot Cake from Cathy Fisher's Straight Up Sweets - Sugar, Oil, Salt & Gluten-free!

Hi everybody, welcome to my video for the 2024 bundle. Today I'm going to demonstrate a recipe from my contribution to this year's bundle which is an ebook that contains 25 of my most popular dessert recipes. I've got in there cookies, cakes, pies, frostings, puddings, all different types of desserts made with 100% plant foods, no added salt, oil, or sugar, and they are all gluten-free. It's called Straight Up Sweets, delicious desserts made from 100% plant foods with no added salt, oil, or sugar that are also gluten-free. In the ebook I also go into a bit of detail about why I don't use salt, oil, and sugar, as well as the grains that I use, the non-dairy milks that I use, I talk about nuts, and parchment paper, and vanilla, and just all the things that have to do with creating desserts. Today I'm going to make carrot cake for you which is probably one of my most popular dessert recipes. All right, so this recipe has six steps and we're going to start with the first step which is to put the dates together in some non-dairy milk here and I'm using just organic medjool dates and this is what I use when I sweeten desserts most of the time instead of refined sugars. This is what a date looks like if you've never seen one and they're not a dried fruit, they just come off the tree like this and they have a very hard pit in the middle so you want to make sure you always get that pit out and then oftentimes they'll have the little cap on the end which actually came off with the seed there so you want to make sure you get both of those off. Dates taste like brown sugar or maple syrup and they're really easy to find in the stores so you shouldn't have a problem. I'm using medjool, you could use deglet noir dates if you wanted to, which is another kind of common date. You can buy them in bulk, you can buy them like this, I find them at my farmer's markets. So I already have all my pitted dates in here with my non-dairy milk and the non-dairy milk I'm using today is a soy milk. I like to use soy milk for desserts because it's a little higher in fat than other non-dairy milks so it just gives a richer flavor and then also added to this is a half of a banana and you'll want to get a banana that's nice and brown like this one and the measurement isn't super exact just get a half a banana you do want it right though because that means it'll be sweeter and then I'll just cut it into some chunks and then I'm also adding a quarter cup I'm adding a quarter cup of brown raisins these are for later but I already added a quarter cup of raisins in here so I'll set these over here for later and then the last thing is I'm going to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract you can also use vanilla beans if you want to all right so we're just going to let this soften and soak for a minute let those dates get nice and soft and we're going to move on to step two which is to preheat the oven which I've already done and then we're going to get our pan ready as well you can make this carrot cake as an 8 by 8 inch cake you can make it as cupcakes or muffins you can make it in a round cake pan if you want to and there are instructions for all of that in the recipe but we're going to use this pan today and we do need to line it with a little bit of parchment paper so it doesn't stick and what you want to do is just pull out a piece of parchment paper enough to cover the bottom and go up the sides this isn't wax paper it's specially made to go in the oven nothing sticks to it and it can withstand high heat so it's perfect for baking if you're using if you're making muffins though then you'll want to get the parchment paper muffin liners and use those instead if you use the regular paper muffin liners the batter will stick because there's no oil in our cake so you want to fold this into quarters if you have a silicone baking pan that's the size you can also use that if you want all right so you've folded that into quarters bring your pan back hold that center where it's all together hold that in the center of your baking pan and hold it there don't move it while you press into the corner and along the edges there and then you'll be able to see the outline and then if you want to be neat about it you can trim off a little bit and then in the corners I make two cuts just so those corners will lay nicely and then you open it back up and then you just center it and push it in pretty neat okay so that was step two I'm going to set this aside we'll come back to it get our mixing bowl out so step three is to grind the flour that we're going to use and I'm using oats today gluten-free oats you can use any kind you want I'm using this one degree brand of oats which I discovered recently and really like so now I'm going to put the rolled oats into the blender because we're going to make our own flour making your own flour is really easy really fast and it tastes better when you grind your own all right so we're just going to grind this so it looks like flour it takes about 20 seconds you can see there it looks like flour go ahead and transfer it to your mixing bowl get it all out of there great then we're going to add some other things to this two teaspoons of cinnamon so two teaspoons of cinnamon this is ground Ceylon true cinnamon that I'm using today and then we're going to put in a little baking powder I use this Hain sodium free baking powder now I'm going to put in a little baking soda both of these will help the cake to rise and a little bit of nutmeg I use a nutmeg grinder the nutmeg partial nutmeg is in there I like whole nutmeg you don't have to use full nutmeg so just grind some onto your cutting board pick it up with your your bench scraper there and then lastly we're going to put in a little bit of ground clove I buy a little bag of ground clove because I don't use it that often and a little bit of ground clove goes a long way so now using a whisk we're going to blend everything together here you can also use a fork but a whisk a whisk works really well to get everything evenly distributed you don't want to give your baking powder your baking soda or your clove in one spot you want it to be evenly stirred in all right so there's all of our dry stuff and that was step three now step four we're going to come back to this maybe I'll move this now step four we're going to go ahead and blend the dates the non-dairy milk the raisins the bananas and the vanilla and we're going to use the same blender jar here and we're just going to blend it until smooth these little raisins out so this is taking the place of traditional eggs brown sugar oil that traditional mixture when it comes to cakes so we're just going to blend it until it's smooth that's it happens pretty quickly especially if you've been soaking your dates now we're going to pour the wet into the dry and I'm just going to use a wooden spoon to stir it we don't want to stir it vigorously just kind of gently fold everything together until all the dry ingredients have been incorporated or to a point where you can't see the dry ingredients anymore so once we've got that stirred we're still in step five we're going to add one and a half one and a half cups grated carrots since this is carrot cake and I just use a regular grater like this with the big holes if you want to use a food processor or something like that you could and then I'm going to add about a half cup of brown raisins you could also use golden raisins if you had those I love walnuts in my carrot cake so I'm adding about a half cup chopped walnuts all right so now I'm going to still kind of gently just fold everything together into the nuts the carrots and the raisins are all evenly stirred in if you don't like walnuts but you like another kind of nut you can do that you could use pecans or chopped almonds if you want to I think walnuts are most delicious and I think they're also pretty traditional for carrot cake so for step six the last step we are just going to spoon all of this batter or pour this batter into the pan it's going to be nice and thick at this point just get it all in there once it's in there we will spread it out I always leave a little bit in there so I could lick the bowl later and you don't have to worry because there's no raw eggs in this all right so now just move the batter into the corners we want to make the hole we want to make the batter nice and even in the pan we don't want there to be like a big pump in the middle just nice and easy push it into those corners we're not pushing down on the batter we're just evening it out so once you have it pretty nice and even you're done almost done all right so there we are we're going to put this in the oven okay I'm back and the cake has finished baking there it is it's a little darker than a well medium brown I would say and it's a little extra brown because it's made with lots of dates so when I take it out of the oven I put it on a cooling rack like this and I just let it sit there for 10 or 15 minutes and then once everything is set up then I just lift this out and I put it back on the cooling rack and at that point I just let it cool completely and I pull these little sides down you can do this take it out and frost it and put it on a cute platter or something or you can do this put it back and back in there and then you can frost it right in the pan if you want and I think that's what I'm going to do today and that makes it really easy if you're taking it somewhere and when you put the frosting on which is optional and then you cut it it looks really nice because the frosting is just on the top there nice and even so I'm going to set this aside and we're going to do the frosting which as I said is optional this is plenty sweet on its own but I'm going to go ahead and show you how to make the frosting so in here we have more dates I have some raw unsalted cashews a little bit of water a little bit of vanilla extract and a little bit of lemon juice now in my ebook that's part of the bundle straight up sweets you can make this as a vanilla frosting or you can make it as a lemon frosting now since this is going on carrot cake and carrot cake normally has cream cheese frosting so you have a little bit of that tang that's why I added the lemon juice so you can do either one so I'm going to use my Vitamix here these have been soaking for quite a while just you just want those nuts to get nice and soft and the dates to get nice and soft because we're going for a really smooth final frosting all right just blend it until it gets nice and smooth and then I usually stop and with my spatula scrape down the corners and the sides if it's too thick you can add a little bit more water just a tiny bit we don't want it to be too we don't want to put in too much water and you can also use your tamper if that is helpful and I think I usually do use that with this frosting so I'll put that in there all right that is working really well let me give it one more scrape you don't want any graininess if possible you want it nice and smooth so don't be afraid to really crank it up it's looking really good and since this frosting has no saturated fat like butter or lard or cream cheese it's not going to stand up the same way so that's why we don't want to add too much liquid because we're trying to keep it thick and you'll see what I'm gonna stop there and let me get a bowl to put this in and I'll show you how nice and smooth it and again because we use dates it's it's a light like tan color instead of white and the more you blend it the lighter it gets I like the color okay all righty you can see how smooth it is you don't want any little pieces of those nuts showing up or the graininess from the dates I'm going to use my frosting knife here and I'm just going to go ahead and put all this on top if you don't like as much frosting you don't have to put it all on top but I made sure to have the frosting make a little bit more just in case there's people out there who wanted extra frosting so I'm just putting it all the way into the corners and you can frost this ahead of time you can frost it you know closer to when you're going to eat it doesn't really matter it even freezes well together already frosted or separately so the idea is you don't want any of the top of the cake showing if possible so I just kind of go back and forth until I get a nice pretty even pattern it's really nice this is very meditative all righty I'm going to stop there there you go how pretty that looks and now I know you want me to cut a piece so let's do that you can cut this into nine kind of big hearty pieces you can cut it into 16 smaller pieces it's up to you I think I'm gonna just go for the nine and you don't want to frost this or cut into it until the cake is completely cooled all right and even though the frosting isn't on all the sides it's a lot on top I think a lot so isn't that like pretty I don't know if you can see that so well up close but it's cooked through you don't want the mushiness on the bottom let's let's take a bite here and I ended up baking this at 350 for 42 minutes that is so good all right I'm gonna leave it at that thank you so much for watching