Sunday 6 September 2015

GBBO 2015: Week 5 Free From - Sugar Free Carrot Cake

This was tough. I have never made anything that is 'free-from' nor ever wanted to really. This carrot cake bake was actually my second attempt at this week's task. First I tried to bake a sugar free sponge cake, but this turned out awful. As in, the cakes came out of the oven closely resembling frisbees as well as tasting god awful. So they went in the bin and I searched for a new recipe to try. This second attempt was more successful than the first, but not by much.
For the sugar free sponge cake I used this recipe, and it produced this;


So this went into the bin where it belonged and I found a new recipe to try. I tried to find a recipe which used ingredients that I already had in the kitchen, as baking a new recipe every week is pretty pricey.
I found this recipe for a sugar free carrot cake on a bbc website, hoping that being from a bbc website it would mean my cake would work.


Ingredients:

225g plain flour
4 eggs
175g grated carrot
4tbsp honey
200ml sunflower oil
2tsp baking powder
1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp vanilla essence
pinch of salt

First preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius so it can heat up while making the cake batter. In a mixing bowl whisk together the eggs, sunflower oil and honey.


Once this is mixed, add in the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and vanilla essence. Also, grate the carrots and add this into the bowl too. I was confused here as I didn't know if it meant 175g of carrot, then grate or 175g of grated carrot - and yes these actually were two different things I found. I chose to go with 175g of grated carrot.



With all the ingredients in the bowl, stir them all together.


Then, pour this mixture into a cake tin. 


This then needs to go into the oven for an hour the recipe said. My cake was in the oven for longer - perhaps the oven temp is different for a fan oven I don't know - but the inside was still uncooked even as the top of the cake was becoming very dark in colour. 


The recipe I found came with a recipe for the frosting, but as it's main component was icing sugar and I wasn't sure if this was allowed, I altered the recipe slightly. Instead of the icing sugar I just added a ton more cream cheese than stated and added more butter, but I kept to only using 1tsp of vanilla essence. So the frosting you see here is mainly cream cheese. I was trying to drown the cake in frosting so it would taste better.




I won't lie to you, this tasted awful. I don't think it was even the fact that it had no sugar, it was the fact that I had clearly gone wrong somewhere in the recipe. You can tell from the dark colour  and lack of rise of the cake that something is wrong with it. Needless to say, I won't be putting vegetables in my cakes again any time soon. This whole baking week was not a success. Let's hope next week will be better.


2 comments:

  1. Gosh wasn't it a difficult week. I ended up with a bake going in the bin too (though of bread) - not nice! Your carrot cake does look lovely though, and at least you've tried and learnt stuff along the way. I know that's what I'm enjoying about the bake off, learning new things x
    Angela x
    Only Crumbs Remain

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  2. I have yet to find a recipe that doesn't taste like it has no sugar in it. Even the Deliciously Ella recipes with maple syrup etc in tasted a bit too healthy for me.

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