Low Fat Carrot Cake with Pineapple and Walnuts

 Fruits + nuts + veggies = cake?!! and a delicious one :-)

This recipe is featured on RecipeNewZ

Source: Adapted from Amanda’s Cookin’

Taste: 5 (out of 5)
Difficulty: 2 (out of 5, the most difficult part shredding carrots)

Ingredients:
- 2 cups flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 tsp orange zest
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 eggs
- 2 ½ cups (3-4 large) shredded carrots
- ½ cup applesauce
- ⅓ cup canola oil
- ½ cup pineapple chunks + ¼ cup pineapple juice (from a can)
- ¼ cup walnuts
Total: 13x9 pan, 16 servings

Directions:
1. Finely chop pineapple chunks and walnuts and shred the carrots.
2. Preheat oven to 350F and grease a 9x13 inch baking pan with no-fat cooking spray.
3. Beat the eggs slightly, add the rest of the liquid ingredients, and mix. Add the sugar and mix until incorporated. Add the dry ingredients and mix well. At the very end add the pineapples, the carrots and the walnuts.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and spread evenly. Bake until the cake is nicely browned and the edges begin to pull away from the sides of the pan, about 40-50 minutes, depending on your oven (50 minutes in my case).
5. Let the cake cool in the pan before cutting and serving.

Afterthoughts
- This is a really wonderful cake: it’s moist, it’s sweet, it’s delicious, it has a little crunch thanks to the walnuts, it keeps well in the fridge. It can also be frozen, but it will be eaten in no time at all :-).
- Amanda’s recipe had cinnamon and raisins, 2 ingredients which I unfortunately have not yet learned to love. So I had to find substitutions, and I think orange zest and pineapples worked just fine. The original recipe also had frosting, but again I, with my strange taste buds, prefer most cakes sans-frosting, so I skipped that part (which also saved me about 50 calories per serving ;-) ). Check out Amanda’s post for the original version.
- This recipe was my SRC assignment. "Now what is SRC?", you might ask. It’s the Secret Recipe Club, where every month each member is assigned another member’s blog and is supposed to choose a recipe from it and post it on a predetermined reveal date. No-one knows who’s got whose blog, so it’s a lot of fun to browse all the posts when they are revealed. I discovered many wonderful food blogs though SRC. And this month I had the honor of making something from the blog of the inventor and founder of the club: Amanda of Amanda’s Cookin’ :-). She has a wonderful blog, you absolutely must visit it if you have not yet. It was very difficult to choose only one recipe, but when I received my assignment I had a lot of applesauce and carrots, which I wanted to use up. So I figured this carrot cake was meant to be made. I baked it the day after I had received my assignment :-).
- I also want to thank Jane Bonacci of the Heritage Cook, who is our group organizer at SRC. The organizers are doing a lot of the logistical heavy lifting to make the participation more fun for the rest of us, and for that I am very grateful! And Jane has a beautiful blog too :-)