Sink Your Teeth Into These: Rawkin' Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Hope everyone had a rockin' 4th of july filled with smiles, laughs, love, and most important...FIREWORKS!! While the east coast was a'blazing, the west has fallen under a big funky cloud of gray. Since it wasn't exactly summer's best weather i headed back to my kitch for a little hobby time. Yup. Time to bake...or in this case unbake, something to warm the soul. I found a recipe for carrot cake on therawtable.com and lucky for me i just so happened to have the majority of the ingredients. While i did make a few substitutions and didn't bother to measure anything i through in the mix, it still turned out pretty fab for my first hack at carrot cake. Two things i learned from this venture:

1. if you are dehydrating in cupcake wrappers you need to take them out of the wrapper after they dry a bit and flip them over so the bottoms will dry (that would have knocked a few hours off my dry time EASY)

2. don't try to make smooth icing in a food processor - stop being lazy, get your blender out, and do it proper. (note slightly chunky consistency in photos)

This recipe made 11 cupcakes...almost a dozen...may have been if i didn't keep trying the dough :)

Recipe as given on therawtable.com:

3/4 cup shredded/grated carrot
1/4 cup medjool dates
1 Tbsp flax seed, ground
4 Tbsp coconut shreds
1 tsp vanilla
2 Tbsp agave
2 Tbsp cashews ground
1/4-1/2 cup raisins (not soaked)
1/4 Tbsp Cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground ginger (i used pumpkin pie spice in place of all of the spices, with a couple extra dashes of cinnamon)
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1/4 tsp salt

You'll need your food processor:

Blend the dates to a paste then add everything EXCEPT for the pecans or walnuts, the raisins, and half the carrots. Once processed, pulse in the remaining ingredients. Taste and make any modifications. Mine had more coconut, carrot, and was all raisins cuz i didn't have dates on hand. Scoop the mixture into cupcake tins. Set your dehydrator at 104 - 115 for a couple hours. Take cupcakes out of wrapper and flip over onto mesh trays to dry bottoms. Allow to dry for another couple hours, checking for doneness.

The original recipe called for a cashew orange frosting. I didn't have any oranges on hand, and much prefer vanilla frosting for carrot cake. Here is the recipe i used for frosting:

1 cup cashews (soaked 4 hours)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp agave (optionally plus 1 tbsp honey)
a little water or lemon juice to get things moving

put all ingredients in a blender and whip up. Optionally you can make raw icing with coconut oil by combining coconut oil, agave, and vanilla.