Carrot-fashion

It seems I’m in the grip of a slight obsession recently.

From porridge:

To cake:

And now to cookies:

It’s all about carrot cake. Carroty, spicy, citrus-y, I love it.

So I knew that for this week’s 12 Weeks of Christmas Cookies And Sweets…

… there was only one way to go:

Carrot cake cookies:

60g brown sugar

2tbsp rapeseed oil

2tbsp milk

75g brown flour (I used GF brown blend)

15g cornflour

35g sorghum flour

50g carrot, very finely grated (use the tiny holes on the grater)

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/4 tsp baking powder

Heaped 1/4 tsp ground mixed spice

1/2 tsp vanilla

Mix together the oil, sugar, milk and vanilla till well combined. Sieve the flours, spice and baking powder together and mix really well, then fold in the carrot. Bring together as a ball, wrap and chill for 30-45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 175C. Roll the dough out on a floured surface (and with a floured rolling pin, it’s sticky!) to about 1/8″ thick, cut out shapes and transfer to a lined baking sheet. Bake for seven minutes and leave to cool and harden on the sheet.

I wanted to make dairy-free cut-out cookies, so I took a basic oil-to-dry ingredientsratio from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar as a basis to work from. And although they weren’t specifically aimed at being healthy; they’re relatively low in fat, with wholemeal flour, and they’re vegan – and there’s vegetables involved…!

and they were great. Not quite as crispy as I’d hoped; they were fairly soft, but the thinner you roll them, the crispier thay’ll be. I’d have added some lemon zest if I had any but as I didn’t…

I mixed icing sugar enough with lemon juice to make a paste and drizzled it over – perfect.

And talking of carrot cakes, my mum loved hers yesterday. Owing to misinformation on the internet, we got there to find the film we wanted to see had started an hour before and the next one wasn’t for two hours – so we went back to hers and ate ratatouille in front of a film called Deja Vu – brilliant, if you haven’t seen it. So not quite what we’d imagined but all good anyway

Hope you like the Christmas cookies series – check out brilliant organiser Brenda’s blog for lots more delicious baking!