Ingredients
- 2 cups cake flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground mace
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 4 large eggs
- 1 1/4 cups coconut oil, melted and cooled
- Grated zest of 1 orange
- 3 cups carrot kraut
- 1/2 cup walnuts or pecans, quickly browned in a pan and then chopped
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries or raisins
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
- Butter and lightly flour either two 10-inch round pans or one 9-by-13-inch rectangular pan.
- Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and mace into a medium bowl.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, eggs, oil and orange zest. Stir in the carrot kraut.
- Using a rubber spatula, fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until combined.
- Finally, add the nuts and dried fruit. Pour the batter into the prepared pans.
- Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, usually 30 to 40 minutes. As soon as the middle no longer looks different than the edges and begins to crack a bit, remove the pans from the oven to preserve the moistness of the cake.Find more recipes and learn about the health benefits of fermented foods in Vegetable Fermentation.
Excerpted from Fermented Vegetables (c) Kirsten K. and Christopher Shockey. Photography by (c) Erin Kunkel. Used with permission of Storey Publishing. Purchase this book from our store: Fermented Vegetables.
Fermented foods are enjoying a surge in popularity. Create delicious kimchis, krauts, pickles and more with the help of Fermented Vegetables (Storey, 2014). Kirsten and Christopher Shockey make this age-old tradition easy for health-conscious home cooks with a variety of beautifully illustrated recipes. The following recipe is for Gingered Carrot Cake.
This book can be purchased from the Mother Earth Living store: Fermented Vegetables.
One of our traditions is that the birthday person gets to pick the three meals on his or her birthday as well as the “cake,” which is in quotes because more than one person in our family is a fan of pie rather than cake. Still, among the cake side of our family, carrot cake rules. When we were brainstorming desserts for this book, we knew we needed to tackle carrot cake.
It wasn’t difficult to get to a ginger-carrot ferment (the main ingredient of this cake) since the fermented version enhances the regular version—it’s somehow lighter and richer than the original, which may come from the interaction of the baking soda and the ferment. The basic recipe is from a favorite baking book, Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking. It’s incredibly moist and spicy, so you don’t need much in the way of frosting. We sometimes frost with just a light spread of sour cream. Otherwise, use your favorite cream cheese frosting.
