Meet Patrick's new juicer: its loud, awkwardly big, and has half a dozen pieces to wash. It makes him happy, so it makes me happy, too. Making fresh veggie juice is great, but I can't bring myself to throw away the leftover pulp. I have big plans to mix it into to pasta sauce, muffins and salsa.
Today, my sweet Sunday snack was my first attempt to use the pulp: carrot cake! I actually baked a cake....from scratch! Cake isn't a snack, you say? Well, hear me out; this cake is full of nutrition: walnuts, raisins, coconut, and of course, carrots!
I found a great recipe on Allrecipes.com: Sam's Favorite Carrot Cake, which was the carrot cake recipe with the highest rating. Instead of shredded carrots, I used this bowl of carrot pulp with a little water stirred in.
I think that since I am using something I would otherwise throw away, I can consider this a recycling project.
After mixing the pulp with all the other delicious ingredients, I baked it for an hour. I had big plans to bake the cake in a cupcake pan, but a friend is borrowing it, so I made a regular sheet cake instead. I also made delicious cream cheese frosting (carrot cake's best friend) to pipe on the slices once they were out of the oven.
While it baked, I played with a little gum fondant (used to make flowers and designs on cakes) and molded it into sweet candy carrots to top my cake with. Lines were pressed into the fondant with a paring knife to give them more of a carrot texture. Once the cake cooled, I piped on the cream cheese frosting and added the candy carrots. A bit of the leftover frosting, mixed with green food coloring, makes the carrot leaves. It looks and tastes very good.
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