Flourless Carrot Cake

A friend of mine suffers from coeliac disease, and as it is her birthday on Saturday, I have been looking up recipes for gluten-free cakes. She requested a carrot cake, and I found an interesting recipe from a Finnish food blog. I modified it a little, and found the end result definitely worth sharing... Yummy!

Flourless Carrot Cake with Mascarpone icing.

Ingredients

For the cake:

4 eggs

1 cup soft brown sugar (or regular sugar)

1 cup double cream

160g butter or margarine

2 tsp. baking soda

150g ground almond

130g chopped nuts

3 tsp. cinnamon

Seeds from 20 cardamom pods

a pinch of ground ginger
a pinch of salt

1.5 cup grated carrots (1 large carrot or 2 small ones)

For the icing:
Zest and peel of one orange
250g Mascarpone (or other cream cheese)
1 tsp. vanilla sugar/dash of vanilla flavour
0.5 cup icing sugar
20g chopped nuts

Price Tag

Approximately £10-15, depending on what ingredients you already have.

Instructions

Cake base:

1. Preheat the oven to 175C. 
2. Peel and grate the carrots. 
3. Combine the soda, ground almond, chopped nuts and spices in a bowl. 
4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg and sugar until fluffy. The mixture is ready when you can lift off the whisk and the drippings float for a second before sinking. This takes a while with brown sugar, but is worth it in the end. 
5. Melt the butter on the hob.
6. Take turns in adding the butter, cream, dry mixture and grated carrots to the egg and sugar mix. Mix carefully. If the dough remains runny, add a bit more of ground almond.  
7. Butter the cake tin and layer the sides with ground almond. 
8. Pour the dough into the tin and bake for about 30 minutes. Let the base cool down completely before icing it.

Ingredients for the base: melted butter, almond/nut mix,
sugar and egg  foam, grated carrots. The double cream is
missing from the picture. 

Icing:

1. Wash the orange and grate the skin to a bowl. 
2. Half the orange and press the juice into the bowl. 
3. Add cream cheese, vanilla and icing sugar. Mix well. 
4. Spread the icing on a cooled base. 
5. Sprinkle chopped nuts on the icing for decoration.
6. Refrigerate the cake for a few hours.

Ready! :-)

Doll's Tips

You might want to decorate the cake by adding whole nuts (or the remaining chopped nuts) on top of the icing.

Sources 

Ruoka-aikamatka - Gluteeniton porkkanakakku (in Finnish)