RECIPE: beetroot and carrot cake with coconut cream chantilly

Carrot cake has never really been my bag, usually it barely comes close to that beautiful natural sweet nutty flavour of carrots and often it's overloaded with sugar. I find myself wondering if there are in fact carrots in there at all! Anyway... I had a ton of beetroot and carrot salad leftovers that could NOT go waste and naturally, carrot cake is the answer. This has certainly changed my opinion!

Beetroot and carrot cake with coconut cream chantilly
adapted from A-Z of Vegetarian Cooking in South Africa

Ingredients:
500ml/2 cup Flour (1 cup wholewheat and 1 cup white flour)
10ml baking powder
bit of cinnamon
bit less nutmeg
pinch of ground allspice
2 eggs, seperated
75ml oil
125ml honey/ 150ml treacle sugar
75ml milk/ water
10ml vanilla essance
rind of 2 grated oranges
500ml grated carrot (or half carrot, half beetroot).

*Nutty Carrotcake: Add 50ml  chopped nuts and 50ml of seedless rasins to the basic batter.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. In a large mixing bowl, combinel the dry ingredients. In a seperate mixing bowl combine all the wet ingredients (except for the egg whites) then add the grated carrot and beetroot. Stir into the dry ingredients and mix well. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and fold carefully into the batter. Place batter into a well greased baking tin. Bake for 45min - 1hour or until an inserted skewer comes out clean.

Chantilly ingredients:
half tin of Coconut cream
500ml icing sugar
desicated coconut/ coconut flakes

Whisk the coconut cream and sifted icing sugar until smooth. Place it in the refrigerator or deep-freeze until firm. Then pour over the cake and sprinkle with coconut.

When I made this, I got a little over-excited about eating it... I ended up pouring the chantilly over the cake while it was still warm which immidiately melted it - still tasted AWESOME though!