So, we grew a bunch of carrots this year. I didn’t really pay any attention to them but we got an awful lot, so they must be easy-going, hardy plants. When I was ready to prepare my garden for spring, we still had a bunch in the ground, so I pulled them all up and have been maintaining them in cold storage. But you can’t have a ton of carrots and not make carrot cake, can you? No, no you can’t.

So I turned to a paleo carrot cake recipe I had seen in passing from The Food Lovers Kitchen. Link here. What really caught my eye was the phrase “…we received feedback from many followers that this was not only a great grain-free substitute, but the best carrot cake they’ve ever had!” Sold.

So the hubs and I embarked on this baking experiment, with some modifications from the FLK recipe. Coconut flour wasn’t available, so we got the Red Mill gluten-free all purpose baking flour. Unfortunately, that means what we made isn’t exactly paleo, but I am considering gluten free to be a minor victory. We’ll try to grab some almond or coconut flour for next time.

We also didn’t soak the carrots in the maple syrup, because the recipe’s prep time was listed at 35 minutes, and when we got to that part of the recipe we didn’t have an hour to soak them, so we skipped that step entirely.

Additionally, we were forced to add some cornstarch into the batter, because it was so soupy. And we got plain old dried dates, not medjool dates. Lastly, we garnished with pecans instead of walnuts, because we got some fresh ones from our CSA.

While we were quite skeptical after seeing how soupy the batter was (and tasting it, bleh), but amazingly, the whole thing really turned out. Our oven racks are a little bowed, so we could have rotated the cake pans more. Since we didn’t, two of the layers were a little overdone on one side. But honestly, we were so relieved that the cake was as good as it was that we couldn’t have been bothered!

Hayley’s big talk about this better-than-all-the-rest paleo carrot cake recipe wasn’t just empty words – this is some delicious carrot cake – even as heavily modified as it was. I’d like to think our homegrown carrots helped, too. We’ll definitely be trying this recipe again!