Vegan Carrot Muffins

I'm still learning about vegan baking, and to help me get some practice, I've been whipping up batches of muffins at the weekend that we can freeze and then Alex can take them to work in his lunch. I am hopeless with baking and if it is there I will just snack on it until it's gone, so it's great I have someone else who will happily eat the spoils of my experiments in the kitchen.

These carrot cake muffins are my latest effort and I think they turned out pretty well. They are quite dense and the vegan cream cheese icing is very similar to the dairy version I used to make. The recipe is adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. If you are interested in vegan baking or baking for those who are intolerant to eggs or dairy, I can highly recommend this book. It has a lot of great basics such as breads, cakes, muffins and cookies plus more dessert-y things like pies, mousses, puddings and cheesecakes. I finally bought my own copy last week after renewing a copy from our local library several times.

The recipe below is the one I used and is slightly adapted from the one in the book, but you could probably use your favourite carrot cake recipe and just replace the eggs with either egg replacer or ground flaxseeds/linseeds (for each egg you replace whisk 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseeds with 3 tablespoons of water in a blender or food processor until the mixture is thick and creamy).

Vegan Carrot Cake Muffins
3 tbsp ground flaxseeds/linseeds (I buy my linseeds from Commonsense Organics and grind them myself in a coffee grinder I use for spices etc)
1/2 cup water
2/3 cup oil
1 1/2 cups grated carrot
3/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
3/4 cup raisins or sultanas
1 1/3 cups white flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground allspice

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Grease your muffin tin (this recipe made 12 standard size muffins).
2. In a blender or food processor, whip together the flaxseed and water until thick and creamy. Transfer this to a medium-sized bowl and add the carrots, raisins/sultanas and walnuts if using. Mix together.
3. In a larger bowl, sift together the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well. Batter will be quite thick.
4. Scoop batter into muffin tins. Bake 25-30 mins. Let cool in pan then remove to cooling racks. Once cool, ice with cream cheese icing.

Vegan Cream Cheese Icing
250g soy cream cheese (I used Kings brand from Commonsense Organics)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup sifted icing sugar

Combine all ingredients in a food processor or mixer until smooth and creamy. Enough to ice 12 muffins.

And while we're on the topic of vegan baking, I just today discovered that Desserts magazine published an entire issue devoted to vegan desserts, and the magazine is free to view or download here. Beware - the pictures of desserts may cause drooling on keyboard!