Carrot Pulp Cake

I love my juicer. I have a Cuisenart Compact Juice Extractor and I use it fairly often, especially for carrot juice. But I am always concerned about the pulp that is left. I hate wasting it. I know people say that there is "nothing" left in the pulp of value but it is still food and I am loathe to waste it.

Today, I created about 7 cups of carrot pulp after making juice from "ugly" carrots at the market. I decided to try two ideas with the remaining pulp. One is still drying so I'll wait on sharing that with you but the other is carrot cake. I think it's yummy. Give it a try and let me know what else you do with juicing pulp please. I doubt I'll have any favourable responses from home if I try making cucumber pulp cake or something like that!

Carrot Pulp Cake

2 cups flour (I use Spelt all the time but regular is fine)
3/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon

3.5 cups (or so) carrot pulp from juicing
3/4 cup melted coconut oil

1/2 cup carrot juice (you could use orange too)
3/4 cup apple sauce

Raisins and Walnuts as desired

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9x11 cake pan or muffin tins.

In a large bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients with a large metal spoon. Mix in the carrot pulp and coconut oil. Make sure it is really well mixed.

Mix in the carrot juice and apple sauce. Again, make sure it is all really well mixed together. Add in the raisins or walnuts. The batter will feel really heavy, more like cookie batter than cake batter.

Spread in the pan. I used my hands to level it out. Bake for 45 minutes if you are making the cake. If you are making muffins, bake for 25 minutes then check that a knife in the middle comes out clean. Let cool. This cake is really orange. Maybe the orange juice would change the colour?













Now, if you want vegan icing, this is the best recipe ever.

1/4 cup tofutti cream cheese
1/4 cup vegan mayo
2 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1-2 tsp lemon juice as desired

Mix the icing sugar, cream cheese, mayo and vanilla together. Add 1 tsp lemon juice then taste. Add more lemon juice as desired. Spread on cooled cake.

I cut the cake in two and layered it. There was enough icing to do this.

Keep the cake refridgerated. Because it is so moist, it will quickly become "wet" and ferment.







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The Most Amazing "Cauliflower" Recipe

This recipe calls for cauliflower but I found this great broccoflower at Nature's Fare and couldn't resist. Its flavour isn't as strong as cauliflower and it just looks so cool. I would certainly buy it again.










I made this with the real greek yoghurt. I used organic but it was still milk. You could try using soy or coconut and I would be interested in hearing how it worked out for you. The greek yoghurt is thick so it really coated the broccoflower and stayed on throughout the baking.

It was quite spicy so I used the leftover yoghurt mix as a dip. It seemed to be less spicy when it hadn't been cooked.

Spicy Broccoflower (adapted from Shape Magazine)

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 head broccoflower
1 1/2 cups plain Greek yogurt
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chile powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and lightly grease a small baking sheet with vegetable oil. Set aside.

Trim the base of the broccoflower to remove any green leaves and the woody stem.

In a medium bowl, combine the yogurt with the lemon juice, chile powder, cumin, garlic powder, curry powder, salt and pepper.

Dunk the broccoflower into the bowl and use your hands to smear the marinade evenly over its surface. (Excess marinade can be stored in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to three days and used with tofu or other veggies.)










Place the broccoflower on the prepared baking sheet and roast until the surface is dry and lightly browned, 40 minutes. The marinade will make a crust on the surface.










Let the broccoflower cool for 10 minutes before cutting it into wedges.










It was delicious! I could have eaten it all!




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Cooking the Book: Cook with Kindness

I love cookbooks and I always want to buy more and more and more. I look through them and if there is one recipe that looks tempting then I want the whole book! Corey suggested that if I wanted to add to my cookbook collection, I should maybe start "cooking the book" and forcing myself to cook three recipes from a cookbook each week for a month to work my way through at least 12 recipes before leaping to my next book. Makes sense.

I decided to start with one of my books that is already on my shelf to see if i can actually do it.

Cook with Kindness is a book published in Canada that my sister-in-law gave to me. It's the best friend of the sister of one of her best friends who wrote it. Not only is it vegan but it's also gluten free. It's a beautiful book.



I have made the recipe on the cover, the peanut butter cups, and they are as delicious and decadent as they look.

I have also made the flax crackers twice and they are scrumptious. They store forever and can be flavoured with spices. I made my second batch with onion flakies. For us, we like to sprinkle salt on top before they bake and we added more onion flakes than we thought they needed and it worked out perfectly. It was also suggested to use salted, roasted sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds to add more saltiness. All my seeds were raw in my recipes.

One recipe covers almost an entire cookie sheet. Make sure you line the cookie sheet with parchment paper.

3/4 cup flax seeds
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
2 tbsp hemp seeds
1/2 tsp sea salt (I added more and add another spice of your choice as desired)

Mix the flax seeds and water in a bowl and leave for an hour until all the water is absorbed. It makes a gluey mess. Kinda gross looking. Add everything else.

Spread onto the parchment paper and bake at 250 for an hour. Turn off the oven and leave it in the oven until it's cool. Break into pieces and store in an airtight container.



Tonight we are having Roasted Squash, Garlic and Red Lentil Soup. It,s a blustery rainy evening so it's a good choice. I'm using the hubbard squash from our garden that is leftover from thanksgiving dinner. It's tasty! Garlicky but the garlic is roasted so not overly so. So far the recipes are yummy!




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Kabaka's Koffee Flavoured Kake

I made this cake last weekend and was sitting at the counter enjoying a piece when Kabaka decided that he LOVES coffee cake and wanted to crawl onto the counter to get a bite. This is the first human food he has tried to get. His claws were dug into my thighs and he was using all his 20lbs of weight to push against me as I tried to stop him from getting to my piece. I like the cake too, as does Corey.

Kabaka's Koffee Flavoured Kake

1 cup unsweetened almond milk
2 heaping tbsp instant coffee granules
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cups flour (mine is whole wheat but I will also try with other types of gluten free flours)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and lightly grease a cake tin/muffin cups/ loaf pan.

Measure out half of the milk and stir in the coffee granules. Once they have almost all dissolved, add the other half of the milk and vinegar. Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Make a well in the centre and add the oil, milk mixture, and vinegar. Stir together with a metal spoon until just combined.

Pour into the prepared pan and cook until a toothpick comes out clean. Muffins are about 25 minutes. A loaf is about 40 minutes. Set your timer for 5 minutes less and check. My oven is a bit off for temperature so I set it higher and cook for about the same amount of time. You know your oven best.

When the cake is cool, you can make a coffee icing that is 1/2 cup margarine, powdered sugar, and instant coffee dissolved in a tbsp of milk. The amounts vary on the intensity of the sugar/coffee flavour that you want.

I have also made these as chocolate chip muffins and added 1/2 cup chocolate chips after mixing in the dry ingredients.

Friday Morning Scones

I love my Fridays off... it has been awesome to have a three day weekend even if most of my Fridays were spent working on my Master's project. Next year it's back to full time. Sigh...

This morning while Corey went for a run (I ran 60 minutes last night for the first time - yahoo!) I decided to make scones for breakfast for when he returned. I modified a recipe from Vegan Brunch which is the same book that I got the muffin/loaf recipe from. These recipes are always great.

Friday Morning Scones

1 1/4 cup "milk" (I used the new almond/coconut milk but any milk will do)
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 cups flour (I used a mix of whole wheat and white)
2 tbsp baking powder
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup margarine (the block, not the tub kind)
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet or use a piece of parchment paper. I use my Silpat.

Measure the "milk" in a large measuring cup and add the vinegar. Set aside to curdle while you make the rest of the mixture.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Cut the margarine into small chunks and crumble it with your fingers into the dry ingredients. The mixture will be like little crumbles when it's all mixed together. What you are aiming for is to not have large clumps of margarine in amongst your flour.

Make a well in the centre of the mixture. Pour in the curdled milk, vanilla and canola oil. Using your fingers again, gently mix it all together. You want to be gentle and use just your fingers, not your whole hand that will overwork the batter. The batter will come together but there will be some dry patches, maybe some dry mixture left at the bottom of the bowl but most of it will hold together. Use your hands to divide the batter into 12 pieces and mould them gently into scone shapes.

Place on the cookie sheet and bake about 20 minutes. They will start to brown on the top and a knife stuck into the centre will come out clean. Eat warm!

The scones are fairly large so next time I will make a half-batch for Corey and I. We still have 8 scones left. The advantage of these is that they are not sweet so they can be eaten with soup or stew. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup sugar with extra to put on top but that makes it too sweet for us. You could add cheese into the batter or blueberries or herbs depending on the rest of your meal or your mood!