Carrotcake

This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)

Are you ready for Autumn? I am!

Carrot cake is the perfect cake for that, don’t you think?

I wanted a really autumn-like cake, and not just to practice my buttercream skills, but also to get this autumn feeling.

Because for autumn the blankets will be thrown on the couch. There will be more tea, chocolate milk and a very big can of cinnamon and other spices will be bought, if you get what I mean?

And then… everything autumn!

This year was a bit different here in the Netherlands, the weather was really off the whole summer, we had rain most of the time and I was a bit disappointed the summer was already over. Luckily we got some nice after-summer sunny days just before the dark days kicked in.

When I started this cake I wanted a buttercream that was not to “buttery”, more like cream cheese buttercream, which I prefer.
So because I didn’t want to replace it with shortening, instead I used “Oatly spread natural” it is a better substitute to create that cream cheese feel. But I don’t know if you have any from where you live so you can use any vegan cream cheese you like.

My cream cheese buttercream didn’t want to hold at first it curdled, I kept whipping it up, but without any luck. After that I tried adding more and more powdered sugar to it to let it hold together properly, 200 grams to be exact, and as a result, it held!

That is the thing with butter cream, most of the time you have to add 1:1 sugar with butter in order to get this really nice and firm consistency.

Since I don’t know if you have Oatly spread in your country I will just write vegan cream cheese in the ingredients.

What I think is really stupid about carrot cake is, you always see they use walnuts OR pecans, but almost never both… I like both so I used both!

Ingrediënten: 

20cm∅ mold | oven 170ºC 

• 60 gr vegan butter
• 250ml almond milk
• 2 tsp apple vinegar
• 350 gr all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• ¼ tsp ginger
• ¼ tsp cardamom
• pinch of salt
• 180 gr light brown sugar
• 3-4 middle large carrots
• 75 gr pecans
• 75 gr walnuts

Buttercream:

• make sure everything is at room temperature!
• 200 gr of vegan butter
• 300 gr vegan cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 400 gr powdered sugar

Preparation: 

– Mix the almond milk and the vinegar and let set for 10 minutes so it will curdle.

– And mix all the dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices, salt and sugar.

– Whip up the butter until creamy in an empty bowl and gradually pour the milk in while mixing.

– The dry ingredients should also be mixed in of course, make sure that everything mixed thoroughly. So you don’t have any lumps of butter left but stop right away after noticing so you don’t overmix.

– Grate the carrots, break the nuts into pieces and fold them through the mixture. It might seem dry, but the more you fold the carrot through the wetter it gets.

– Separate the mixture into 2 greased molds from 20∅cm and bake them in an oven on 170ºC for about 20-30 minutes. (you can try to bake the mixture into one mold but I don’t know if it fits)

– After baking let the cakes cool down outside the molds, then the mold is not to hot to touch anymore.

– While the cakes are cooling down you can go ahead with the butter cream.

– Make sure everything is on room temperature, I find it the safest option to leave them out of the fridge overnight.

– Whip up the butter until creamy, and add the cream cheese and the vanilla. Mix again until creamy.

– Then gradually add the powdered sugar until the wanted structure.

If your butter cream starts to curdle anyway, then keep whipping on top of a bowl with ice water or warm water (depends on the ingredients being to warm or the cold).

To “un-curdle” your buttercream, you have to whip so much longer then you might expect. (once I have been whipping my butter cream for 30 minutes until it was good.) So preventing it from curdling is better than curing it.

When you fitted the cakes into one mold you need to cut the cake in half before putting the butter cream on if you just baked it in 2 molds like me then just start getting that butter cream on your cakes and let your creativity do the rest!

NOTE: The pictures of the carrot cake is half of the recipe! So 12∅cm mold.