Delicious Ginger-Macadamia-Coconut-Carrot Cake recipe

I promised I’d post this recipe, which is from Vegan With A Vengeance:

Ginger-Macadamia-Coconut-Carrot Cake

2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground or freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup pineapple juice
1/2 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
1/4 cup crystallized ginger, chopped
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
2 cups carrots, grated

Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease two 8-inch round springform cake pans, or one 9×13″ baking pan.

In a medium mixing bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ground spices.

In a large mixing bowl, mix the pineapple juice, oil, sugar, maple syrup, and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and combine well with a hand mixer or strong fork. Fold in the macadamias, ginger, coconut, and carrots.

Divide the batter evenly between the two round pans, or spread in the rectangular pan, and bake for 40-45 minutes. Let it cool in the pans. Once it is cool, remove from the pans and put coconut icing (recipe to follow) between the layers and more icing on top. If you’ve used a rectangular pan, you can cut the cake in half to form the two layers, or leave it as one layer.

Coconut Icing:
1/4 cup margarine at room temperature (earth balance brand is vegan!)
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Cream the frosting until light and fluffy. Add the coconut milk and vanilla and combine. Add the confectioners sugar and mix until smooth. Hand held mixer recommended for this! Add the coconut, mix to combine, and refrigerate until ready to use.

This cake was so delicious, I can’t praise it enough. And it was very easy to make. In fact, considering that neither Mary nor I make cakes often (for me, almost never!) and we’d been drinking a fair amount of wine (at least I was!), and we were talking with her husband and another friend of theirs while putting this together, I feel that this recipe is practically fail-proof! And delicious. Did I mention that?

One of the compositional rules you’ll often hear is that subjects showing movement or looking in a certain direction should be given room to “move through” or “look through” the frame. (In other words, if the subject is moving or looking from the left to the right, it is best to position them more on the left side of the picture.) This picture, obviously, does not follow that rule, with the subjects almost leaving the frame. It works for me, though, and I’ve thought about why - I think it is because of their footprints.

~ by Deb on January 19, 2008.