No Waste! Vegan Gluten-Free Carrot-Apple Pulp Cake

It's not pretty but it surprisingly tastes good!

This cake is a combination of two of my growing passions: getting creative in the kitchen with limited ingredients and striving towards a lower-waste, more eco-friendly lifestyle.

I spent yesterday afternoon doing my best to capture the attention of my nephew (who is two months shy of being three years old) via FaceTime, which is no easy feat!

We made a carrot-apple-ginger juice together, me doing all the work while he watched, counted out the number of carrot sticks we needed, and did quality control on the apple slices by telling me when there were seeds I needed to pick out.

The juice was delicious but of course, what's left behind is a lot of dry pulp. Usually, because energy is lacking, I compost the pulp but this time, my nephew got excited about the prospect of me turning the pulp into a cake.

I had pretty minimal expectations for how this would turn out, especially because I'm very low on supplies right now (haven't gone grocery shopping since my husband was here at the very beginning of January) but I gave it a shot, used what I could find, and I'm not going to lie, I'm really enjoying the end result! Keep on reading to find out how I made this cake that is both vegan-friendly and gluten-free.

This is a VERY loose recipe because I wasn't paying close attention to quantity and am trying to remember what I did from memory:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of flour (I had about 1/2 cup of Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free 1:1 Baking Flour + 1.5 cups of One Earth's Organic Coconut Flour)
• 2 cups of juicer pulp (mine was carrot + apple with a small amount of ginger)
• 1/4 cup of organic coconut milk (leftover in my fridge, figured it could add some moisture)
• 1 cup of homemade applesauce (I needed a binder, had no eggs or egg-substitute, so I defrosted some applesauce I had in my freezer)
• 3/4 cups of sugar
• roughly 2 tsp baking soda
• roughly 1 tsp baking powder
• roughly 1/2 tsp of Himalayan pink salt
• approx 1 generous tsp of cinnamon (I didn't add too much because the applesauce was spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg
• shredded coconut (eyeballed this, didn't add too much)
• approx 1/2 cup of sunflower oil (it's the most neutral flavour oil I had compared to avocado and olive oil)

What I did:

• Preheated oven to 350F
• Mixed together the pulp, applesauce, coconut milk, oil, and sugar
• Mixed in the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and shredded coconut
• Scooped mixture (it's a bit thick so it doesn't pour) into the trays lined with parchment paper
• Baked for approx 25-35 minutes

It's fairly flavourful, sweet, and surprisingly moist! Dryness is a concern with pulp cakes because depending on your juicer, the pulp can be very dry (which is ideal when making juice because you want as much liquid being extracted). I think the combination of coconut milk, applesauce, and oil made this one really moist).

I'm happy I gave this a shot. It's shown me that I can successfully repurpose what I formally considered a waste by-product from making fresh-pressed juice and now I have something new to eat in a kitchen that's currently looking pretty scarce of edible options! This morning, I microwaved a slice for 15 seconds and loved eating it warm :)