Each and every Fall when the temperatures begin to drop and the humidity magically wanes, I crave baking a dessert that helps usher in the new season.  A dessert that is comforting and that fills the kitchen with smells of ground cinnamon, ginger and a pinch of nutmeg. Some years it is a homemade apple pie, others it might be pumpkin bread; but this year, I settled in on baking a homemade carrot cake.  Not just any carrot cake, but a carrot-pineapple cake with a decadent cream cheese frosting.

The cake itself has all of those aforementioned warming spices, plus grated carrots, chopped pineapple, nuts, and raisins;  the frosting is a mixture of organic cream cheese, vanilla and heavy whipping cream.  But magically, both the cake and frosting do not contain any white granulated sugar. I know that seems like pure magic to bake a cake without granulated sugar, but no joke, the cake and frosting are sweetened with apple juice concentrate and the pineapple juice from the canned pineapple.  And the results are a perfectly sweet cake that will please any carrot cake lover. I recommend this unique recipe, and all of the other recipes found in Joanne Chang’s (of Boston and Cambridge’s Flour Bakeries) fabulous cookbook: Baking with Less Sugar.

(To view this recipe, click on the blue title of the blog post above*)

Tagged: apple juice, Baking with Less Sugar, carrot cake, carrot-pineapple cake, cream cheese, cream cheese frosting, grated carrots, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, heavy whipping cream, Joanne Chang, nutmeg, pineapple juice, raisins, spice cake, walnuts