Christmas Carrot Sweets

I often make carrot juice and I have lots of carrot pulp left over, so I decided to make some little sweets with a few Christmas flavours. These came out really well, moist and soft. I started with 1 kg of organic carrots, drunk the juice (it makes approx. 500ml of juice) and use the leftover pulp (approx. 400 g, when removing the bigger bits of carrots that didn't get pulped - eat those as they are, they are too big for baking).

Ingredients

1 kg organic carrots

120 g butter

3 eggs

100 g demerara sugar

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/3 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

100 g self rising flour

50 g mixed citrus peels

icing sugar to dust

Wash and brush the carrots well, then juice (and drink the juice). If you use organic carrots you don't need to peel them. Keep the leftover carrot pulp (approx 400 g) aside. Melt the butter. In the meantime mix the eggs with the sugar with an electric beater. 

Add the melted butter, spices, flour and citrus peels. Fold in the carrot pulp (it is quite dry, but finer that grated carrots). I made two different shapes: I spoon some mixture in cupcake cases, and shaped some little cones with the remaining mixture and placed them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. The cones were better in my opinion, so if you you have time follow this method. Bake at 180°C for 25 minutes, or until the bottom of the cones look done and detach well from the baking paper. The sweets in the cupcake cases needed a bit longer to cook (next time I'll just make the cones!). Let them cool down then sprinkle with icing sugar. I hope that you will enjoy them as much as I did!

Happy Holidays!

Sunflowers from Kate, Liz and Jan, thank you guys!!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©