Carrot Cake Cookies

These Carrot Cake Cookies are so soft, buttery and sweet you wouldn’t think they were made with leftover carrot pulp from my juicer…

My maternal grandmother, Olive, hated waste. Born in 1914 to a Methodist farming family, her no-nonsense upbringing and the austerity of two World Wars meant she knew how to economise and save. 

As a young woman, she left rural life for a time, moving to London in the late 1930s where she worked for a chemist near Marble Arch. It’s close proximity to the US Embassy meant that she occasionally served a young pre-Presidential John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby – both stationed in London while their father worked as the US Ambassador to Britain. 

Her cosmopolitan city life was cut short however when, on the eve of the Second World War, she returned home to see her parents and her father forbade her to return to London. This in turn led to her taking a job in a local chemist where she met and fell in love with the local pharmacist John – my grandfather. The chemist shop that she worked in has been meticulously recreated as an exhibit at Preston Farm Museum in Stockton on Tees- even including the stool my grandmother would sit on to write out the receipts for the shop.

I loved to spend time with my grandmother when I was little. We would busy ourselves for hours in the kitchen where she would nurture my freedom to experiment with flavours and taste. Recipes were there as a guide; if two eggs were required, she would add one alongside a cup of milk. This would lead to ‘interesting’ results, but she had grown up in a time where you had to get by with limited resources.

My family still fondly remembers her hatred of waste. Mouldy bits of cheese would be cut off and fed to the dog – the remainder being perfectly fine to use in a sandwich for my grandfather. While most people would throw out a stale old ginger cake, long forgotten at the back of the cupboard, my grandmother would see an opportunity to make a trifle. Having remove the worst bits, she would “moisten” it with a waft of the cork from a bottle of sherry before topping it with fruit, custard and cream.

While some of her food choices are questionable today (anyone for a cow tongue sandwich?!) it is the spirit of her frugality that leads me to this recipe for Carrot Cake Cookies…

We quite often juice fruits and vegetables in our house to top up our five a day. Anyone who has ever juiced fruit and veg will tell you that you are left with a mountain of damp pulp at the end of the process. This begs the question as to what to do with all that pulp… It does seem a shame to throw it onto the compost heap…

These Carrot Cake Cookies use the pulp of juiced carrots. I simply pop my carrots through the juicer first to isolate the pulp; reserving this to one side before juicing the other fruits and veg. Because all the juice has been extracted, the pulp does not result in soggy, dense cookies. These biscuits are wonderfully soft and light, with crisp edges – everything you would want in a cookie.

As a note – If you don’t have access to a juicer, you can still make these biscuits with 125g of finely grated carrots. Just use a clean tea towel to wring out some of the liquid before you add it to the mix. I also use my Pumpkin Spice Mix in this recipe, but please feel free to use a normal mixed spice mix if you prefer.

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