Carrot Biscuits

I was having a very interesting conversation with the lady at the cashier of a too famous and too large retail store a few evenings ago. She was commenting on my shop, I am cutting out refined sugars (I will blog about that soon), and we were discussing how difficult this was, because sugar is absolutely everywhere, even in savoury products.

She then told me that her and her family once followed a wartime diet, for a couple of weeks. She suggested I look into it for inspiration, for the very simple reason that unfortunately they had no choice but to be a bit creative with the limited produce they had available at the time, and also because they usually are pretty healthy and simple (fresh, organic, seasonal) recipes.

She particularly recommended to make carrot biscuits, I love carrots, I was all over this!

I found this recipe on the website recipespastandpresent.org.uk. I really like the little anecdote about the surplus of the vegetable back in the days, and the creative ways the Government used to convince people to eat it!

In terms of cooking, I don’t think you can make it any simpler:

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon margarine
2 tablespoons sugar + a little extra
A few drops vanilla flavouring
4 tablespoons grated raw carrot
6 tablespoons Self Raising flour (or plain flour + a half teaspoon of baking powder).

Method:
Cream the fat and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the flavouring and carrot.
Fold in the flour.
Form mixture into about 12 or 15 small balls.
Place each ball on a baking tray and flatten.
Sprinkle with sugar and bake in a brisk oven for 20 minutes.

Job done…

Because I’m sugar-free, I replaced the sugar with honey. It works well. Don’t use too much, good carrots should be quite sweet already.

If you want to make it even healthier, use coconut oil instead of margarine (I did), it works well too 🙂

And you can even adapt it to be gluten-free, by using gluten-free flour, or any other alternatives (brown rice flour, buckwheat flour, soy flour, chickpea flour…).

I stuck with normal white self-raising flour, because I had some, and I am not gluten intolerant. So admittedly I do not know how well it works, if you fancy trying it, let us know how you get on in the comments below!

Happy baking,

Brox

Source

PS: I would of course recommend using organic carrots, for a better taste, but also less risk of ingesting pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals… 🙂