Vegan Carrot Bread (Quick Bread)

Most of the cakes have their low fat counterparts.
If cake and cupcakes are high in calories, their counterparts are bread and muffins. It is not true all the time though. There are almost fat free cake recipes and there are muffins loaded with fat.
Generally speaking,
You have Chocolate cake, there are cocoa muffins.
There is banana cake and then there is banana bread.
Talk about applesauce cake and applesauce bread.
Keeping that tradition, I made carrot bread as a healthy alternative to eating carrot cake. Throw in some walnuts if you would like. They will be super delicious.
I didn't want to pick them up from kitchen floor. So, I ate some walnuts as is and didn't put it in the batter.

One Year back -  Skillet baked sourdough Pita
Ingredients:
Whole Wheat Flour - 1 1/2 cups
Sugar - 1/2 cup (If you like it very sweet, use 3/4 cup)
Salt - 1/4 tsp
Baking Soda - 1/2 tsp
Baking powder - 1/4 tsp
Five spice powder - 1 tsp (See Notes)
Vegetable Oil - 1/4 cup
Shredded carrots - 1 cup (3 medium carrots)
Crushed pineapple (undrained) - 1/2 cup (See Notes)
Flax meal - 2 TBSP
Warm water - 1/2 cup (See Notes)
Raisins - 1/2 cup (optional)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease a 8 X 4 loaf pan with vegetable oil spray. I used 3 mini loaf pans instead. Set aside. In a bowl, mix warm water and flax meal. Set aside for 5 minutes. In a bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, salt, five spice powder, baking soda, baking powder. Coat the raisins with about 1 TBSP of this dry mixture. Whisk the flax seed and warm water mixture. Add oil, crushed pineapple to it and mix. Pour the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Stir in raisins and carrots. Pour into the prepared pan (Or divide between the mini loaf pans). Bake for 45 - 55 minutes (or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean) for a 8 X 4 pan or in my case 30 - 35 minutes as mini loaves. You can also bake them as muffins. In that case, check at 23 minutes. Cool on the wire rack in the pan for 10 minuets. Turn it on to the wire rack to cool completely. Slice when completely cool. This makes a great snack bread or breakfast bread. Not too sweet, full of goodness from carrots and whole wheat flour.

Notes:
This is not the first time I am making this bread. I was experimenting a sourdough bread using carrots and converted that into a quick bread without using sourdough. When I made it last time, I had not used pineapple. The batter was so thick and even when it tasted great, it didn't get the shape of the loaf at all. It was more like a scone or a big fat cookie. I had also used half whole wheat and half all purpose flour in the first experiment. To fix the thick batter, I added 1/2 cup crushed pineapple. You could use mashed bananas or applesauce instead. Since I used all whole wheat flour, I had to increase the water content by 2 TBSP to fix the batter. That is the reason for using 1/2 cup warm water with flax meal instead of 6 TBSP. I used five spice powder but you could use your favorite spice powders. Use Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger or a combination of these up to 1 tsp.

Enjoy.