Best Ever Vegan Carrot Cake

This have been very quiet on this blog lately - my apologies! I do, however, have an excellent excuse. I have spend the last three weeks in Sri Lanka having the most amazing holiday, thus not being able to post. If you keep your eye on the blog in the next few days you'll see lots of great pictures of all the curries I ate and a wonderful cooking class I took in Unawatuna (on Sri Lanka's south coast). First though, here is something very un-Sri Lankan!

I flew in last night and after a very long day of flying and today I slept until 12:40pm! Sounds bad, I know, but actually it was only 8am in Sri Lanka, so I didn't feel so bad! When I finally got myself out of bed I jumped back on my blog to see how it had fared in my absence. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the blog had quite a lot of hits still - thanks guys! I was also pleasantly surprised to find that I had about 3 hours left to enter the July Sweet Adventures Blog Hop - Nuts About Sweets.

Luckily I had this incredible vegan carrot cake in the archive, which is packed full of tasty walnuts! I'm a long time lover of carrot cake, but there are a lot of awful ones out there! I had it a lot as a kid but not as much as an adult. One night I had a real craving for carrot cake while I was out with friends so I decided to have a decidedly un-vegan moment (I'm only human! It happens sometimes) and bought a piece of carrot cake from a bakery on King St in Newtown. It was dreadful. Dry and bland cake covered in a thick icing which pretty much tasted like butter with a little bit of sugar. It was devastating and I threw most of it in the bin - all it did was make me crave real carrot cake more!!

So I knew I had to make a better one! It had to be my mother's recipe, so I decided to do a vegan version. It was incredible, the absolute best carrot cake I have ever eaten! So here it is - easy and delicious!

Ingredients

The Cake

1 cup oil

1 ½ cups sugar

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of salt (optional)

3 cups grated carrot

1 1/3 cups apple sauce

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

2 cups wholemeal flour

The Icing

1 tsp vanilla

60g nuttelex

125g vegan cream cheese

2 cups soft icing mixture

To Make

1. Mix sugar, oil and apple sauce well. 
2. Add dry ingredients (sifted), carrots and nuts. Mix well.
3. Pour into a greased and lined cake tin
4. Bake at 120 degrees celcius for 1 hour.
5. Remove and allow to cool for 20 minutes or so in the tin before turning out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.
6. Cream the vanilla, nuttelex and cream cheese together using an electric beater or a knife. Mix in the icing mixture and mix until completely smooth and fluffy. Ice the cake however you like.