NOURISH | How to Keep Your Healthy Diet and Still Eat Dessert

"Carrot Cake" from The Art of Raw Food

Until very recently, when I heard of raw food I was mainly thinking of salad, raw vegetables and fruit. In fact, I completely ignored that raw food included much more than that. Did you know that there existed a wide range of raw desserts? As a great dessert lover, I was amazed by all the recipes I came across in The Art of Raw Food: Delicious, Simple Dishes for Healthy Living, by Jens Casupei and Vibeke Kaupert.

I studied some of them more closely and was eager to try one out. Unfortunately, most recipes require a food processor, and I don’t have one. So instead of using a food processor, I improvised with a blender, which is a little bit more time-consuming but worked out just as well.

To start with, I chose the following recipe:

Carrot Cake

1 1/4 cups (3 dls) oatmeal  

1/2 cup (1 dl) hazelnuts

3/4 cup (2 dls) dates, soaked

8 carrots

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon cardamom

1/2 cup (1 dl) raisins

 

1 cup (2 1/2 dls) cashews

Juice of 1/2 orange

4 tablespoons raw honey

Garnish:

Grated orange zest

Grind the oatmeal in a coffee grinder or with a hand blender. Do the same with the nuts. Remove pits from the dates and cut them into small pieces. Peel the carrots, cut them into small pieces, and blend well in a food processor. Add dates, flour (oatmeal and nuts), vanilla, cinnamon, and cardamom, and blend. Then add the raisins and blend.

 Pour into a pie dish and leave it to stand in the refrigerator.

 Chop the cashews very finely with a hand blender, add juice and honey, and stir until you have a delicious, thick cream.

 Just before serving, pour the cream on top of the cake and garnish with orange zest.  

So instead of putting all the ingredients together in a food processor, I put them separately into the blender and mixed them at the end. I have to admit that this took me a lot more time, and the result was completely different from traditional desserts. However, what I prepared was an extravagant, delicious and very refreshing culinary delight. My landlady, who had told me that she refused to eat raw food because her stomach couldn’t bear it, was so tempted by the carrot pie sitting in the fridge that she admitted she had eaten two slices of it and greatly enjoyed it… As to my colleagues at North Atlantic Books, they were happy to taste something new and unusual but all agreed that it shouldn’t be called ‘cake’ because it is really very different from what you would expect a cake to be like.

Nevertheless, I’m inspired, and my next raw food recipe will be either the lemon pie or the sinful chocolate pie. Now it’s your turn! Have you ever tried a raw dessert recipe? If not, I highly recommend the carrot cake. Enjoy!