Carrot Cake with raisins, dates, and pecans.
*DIABETIC FRIENDLY: This is a nearly sugar-free recipe that
sweetens with very little dark brown sugar and fruit*
2 large egg whites at room temperature
1/2 cup (114 g) plain nonfat yogurt
3 tablespoons (45 ml) canola oil
1/2 cup (136 g) unsweetened applesauce
1/3-1/2 cup (73 g) dark brown sugar, packed
2 + 1/4 teaspoons (10 ml) vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups (313 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons (10 ml) baking powder
1/2 teaspoon (5 ml) baking soda
1/4 teaspoon (2.5 ml) salt
2 & 1/4 teaspoon (5 ml) ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) ground nutmeg
1 cup (110 g) shredded carrots
1/2 c unsweetened crushed pineapple with juice
PLUS 2 TBSP of pineapple juice.
1/3 cup baking raisins
1/3 cup of chopped pecans
1/3 cup of chopped dates
Whole and chopped pecans for garnish
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly coat your pan with the baker's joy cooking spray. Baker's Joy Cooking Spray already has the flour built in and omits a step!
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the egg whites, yogurt, oil, applesauce, brown sugar, and vanilla. On a piece of waxed paper, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Gradually add to egg-applesauce mixture, stirring until incorporated.
3. Stir in the carrots, raisins, stir the pineapple (with juice), dates, pecans, and raisins into the cake batter.
4. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with the back of a spoon. Bake for 30-35 mins and check it. When the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan it gives just a tad, its done. (toothpick will also come out clean).
5. Cool in the pan on a rack for 20 minutes.
6. Ice when COMPLETELY cooled -- icing recipe to follow.
FROSTING: (Also Sugar-Free)
8 oz. nonfat cream cheese (softened)
1 (9 oz.) pkg. sugar-free vanilla pudding
1 1/2 cup of milk
1 (8 oz) tub of sugar-free cool whip (Sometimes I use half, sometimes I use all – I just add it until I get the texture and thickness that I want that day, depending on my mood!)
Food Coloring: Red, Yellow, and Blue.
With an electric mixer, beat cream cheese until smooth. In a separate bowl, mix the pudding together with the milk until smooth. Mix the two together in an electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Mixture will be fairly thick. Slowly mix in a third of the cool whip. Pull out about 2 tbsp of the icing and separate into two tiny bowls (1 tbsp in each). Continue to add the cool whip until the desired thickness is reached.
(** I add the cool whip to get it to the thickness I want..... the less you put in, the thicker it is -- I would fold in between 1/2 & 3/4 of a tub - Also, You can do a double batch of this icing, but cut the cool whip down to 1 & 1/2 tubs if you double it*
Frost the cake as you would a two layer cake.
With the reserved tiny bowls of icing, add red and yellow food coloring to one (making a bright carrot-orange) and blue and yellow to the other to make (dark green – for carrot leaves). Using a sandwich bag with the tip snipped off, pipe carrots and their leaves onto the top of the cake with the leaves pointing out and the carrot tips pointed toward the center of the cake. I usually pipe 6 or 8, depending on how big I make them. In between each carrot, I decorate with a pecan half and put chopped pecans all the way up the sides, all the way around the cake. With the left over plain icing, I usually pipe decorative stuff (at the top - between the 'carrots' and pecans and around the edge at the bottom).
I'm 25 years old and come from a family of diabetics. My mom's favorite dessert is carrot cake and I felt so bad that she wasn't allowed to have it anymore because of her diabetes. I decided to find a recipe that would be blood sugar friendly to her. This is the product of that journey. This recipe is my own development. I found a few diabetic carrot cake recipes but they tasted like cardboard and were very dry. I switched around the ingredients, and added my own until it came out the way I would want my carrot cake to be. I also found a sugar free cream cheese frosting for a different diabetic recipe, but I changed a few ingredients and the proportions until it tasted right to me.
In my family I'm known for two recipes, turtle cheesecake and this carrot cake. I have never entered it into any competitions and never won anything for it, but I will tell you this. . . A couple of years ago, my uncle (who is very competitive) decided he would make his girl friend's great grandmother's recipe for carrot cake and it'd blow away my diabetic carrot cake and then he decided that he'd make what he called 'New York' style cheesecakes that would blow away my turtle cheesecake. Well I did my two desserts like I always did and didn't change a thing. My family ate lunch and when it came time for dessert, they came in and saw his two cheesecakes and his carrot cake and then mine (They knew which ones were mine because I've been making them for the past 5 years). At the end of the night when we were dividing the leftovers to take home, my cakes were gone -- both of them. I think I had one piece of carrot cake left over and my grandmother snatched it up and hid it in the very back of her refrigerator. My uncle had only one piece of each taken FROM his. He had nearly a whole carrot cake and nearly two whole cheesecakes to take home. Both of mine were devoured. The worst thing is, no one even wanted his leftovers! My aunt (his sister) told him at the end of the night "You know Jennifer makes the desserts here and she's good at it. You need to stick with what you're good at and let her do what she's good at!"
In the entire cake there is only 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar. The rest is sweetened with natural sugars from fruit and fruit juices. The icing is 100% sugar free. I really hope you try this recipe and that you enjoy it. Even if its not entered into the URS, I hope that you share it with someone who is diabetic and loves carrot cake and that they love it and make it over and over again.
