No-Bake Carrot, Orange & Ginger Bars with Creme Cheese Frosting
Easter dessert came early this year.
Colorful chefs - happy Thursday 🧡
This is where we cook easy, delicious, saucy, colorful meals made from whole, unprocessed foods, and we make it fun, easy, and learn important stuff about metabolic health and home cooking while doing it.
No-Bake Carrot, Orange & Ginger Bars with Creme Cheese Frosting: A not-too-sweet spring dessert that requires no oven and tastes almost as good as the Erewhon carrot cake (THE GOAT).
How ChatGPT can make home cooking easier and and more fun: I collaborated on a fun piece — From prompt to plate: a new kind of sous chef — with a dear friend of mine and spilled all my tips on what AI is great at with cooking and where it falls short in the kitchen. You know Alfie is my #1 sous chef, but chatGPT is a close #2. I also shared the specific prompts I use regularly!
What recipes are you craving? I’m curious, which meal of the day feels the most blah to you right now? Where are you most interested in adding new recipes or more color into your day?
If you’ve got other feedback please shoot me a note!
The why behind this one is not profound — it’s that I really, really love carrot cake. We had it for our wedding cake, and it’s just my favorite combination of flavors ever. I have many other carrot themed recipes — a cupcake meets a muffin (aka a “cuffin”), carrot morning glory muffins, carrot cake protein balls, carrot cake smoothies — you get the picture.
So, these raw carrot cake bars with notes of orange and ginger felt like the natural next edition to the carrot lineup. Plus, oranges are everywhere right now and I don’t think people combine the flavors of orange and carrot enough.
These bars are everything I want in a lil’ treat:
They taste sweet…but not too sweet! The only sweetener is dates and raw honey.
Packed with sneaky micronutrients (carrots, almond flour, walnuts etc.), fiber (chia or basil seeds, almond flour), and protein (protein powder optional but given all the other ingredients, if you add just 1 scoop of protein, you get ~10g of protein per bar)
Blood sugar friendly because of the combination of fat, fiber, protein!
No refined sugars — just raw honey (I use Lineage Provisions, code SONJA10) and dates!
Easy and delicious! These are very hard to mess up. They are also no-bake and come together quickly in a food processor
Like most of my recipes, they are also wildly flexible. You can use any seed-oil-free nut butter you like (cashew is my go-to for its creamy sweetness), any gluten free flour, and you can swap the cream cheese frosting for coconut yogurt or cashew cream if dairy’s not your thing (see notes in the swaps section of the recipe).
This is the kind of recipe I want in my fridge at all times in early spring! Something to reach for after lunch, bring to a weekend gathering, or maybe even serve for an Easter celebration?
RECIPE LINK HERE
If you make this recipe (or ANY of my recipes!) PLEASE share feedback with me!! Comment below or on the recipe in the Color Club, and if you are on IG, tag me @sonjakmanning.
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Chefs kisses,
Sonja