All week on NEB, I’ve shown off these carrot & pineapple cupcakes as part of my bento box lunch. These were fairly simple to make, way tasty and in the long run, not so bad for me (or so I hope, more on that at the end of the post). I used this Recipezaar recipe, with a few omissions, to make these cupcakes.
The ingredients I had to split into two pictures. The ingredients shown above are 2 cups all purpose flour, 2 cups shredded carrots, 1 cup sugar, canola oil (1 cup needed). A Note about the Oil: When I first made these cupcakes, I followed the recipe and used the oil mentioned. However, I noticed that you could substitute applesauce for the oil. I made a second, smaller batch using applesauce. The cupcakes came out well both ways. However, using applesauce will cut your calories pretty much in half.
The rest of the ingredients include: 1 8-ounce can of crushed pineapples, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla extract.
Before you start the recipe, preheat your oven. These cupcakes will bake at 350°F.
Shred two cups of fresh, raw carrots. I peeled about 3 average sized carrots to get 2 cups.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.
With a whisk, combine and sift these ingredients together well.
Make a well in the center of the mixture and pour in the cup of sugar.
Next add your applesauce (or oil), eggs, and vanilla. This picture shows oil. I do recommend using the applesauce.
With a wooden or silicone spoon, mix these ingredients together.
Mix the ingredients until everything is well blended. The batter will be a dark brown color and quite thick.
Now add the shredded carrots and pineapple. Be sure your can of pineapple is well drained.
Now mix these ingredients together until well blended. The addition of the pineapple will help loosen up your batter. The batter will seem more “cake-like” and not so thick.
Using a mini muffin pan, fill the pan to where each cupcake section is nearly full. Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes.
Once baked, remove from the muffin pan and cool on a wire baking rack. I was able to make 50 mini cupcakes from this recipe. These fit very well in my bento box.
I mean look how tasty they look.
They have worked really well for me as a nice evening snack when I work on this blog. A bit of fruit on the side, and yum yum!
I recently found a website that helps me calculate a nutrition facts label for the recipes I’ve been using. To caculate these numbers, all ingredients were listed into a recipe builder, and the serving size was listed as 1 mini-cupcake. Also, these nutrition facts were built based on using applesauce, not canola oil. Using canola oil will double the amount of calories and other items in the nutrition facts label.
This label is meant as a guideline only, and I am not in any way an expert in this.
I used My Food Diary (www.myfooddiary.com) to generate this label.
I hope everyone enjoys these cupcakes who chooses to make them.
For a printable version of this recipe, you can download a .pdf file of these Carrot & Pineapple cupcakes. Just right lick on the link and choose “Save Link As.”
Be the bento everyone!
Wow! Delicious. I’m totally going to try these. Also thanks for sharing the nutrition label. I might start using those on my blog, what a great way to share that information easily.
Also, I was thinking about your idea of the printable “to go” sets. I’m not sure if this would work for you, but you might simply be able to create a style sheet for people to use when printing posts that makes for a more print friendly layout and not have to go through the trouble of creating a pdf. That’s something I’m trying to figure out how to do on my own site right now.
Thanks Sarah. Actually, I thought about trying to do a print style for the website. I didn’t for two reasons. 1. I didn’t have any clue at all how to do that. Maybe one day when I’m rich and anonymous I’ll hire someone to do it for me. LOL! 2. I wanted to give people the option of being able to download it and print at their convenience if they want to. Many times I do that, save a recipe to a file rather than print it out, depending. If you come up with something, please let me know! I’d love to see how you work it out for your blog.
Yay, I love My Food Diary! I don’t have time to use it during the school year but I check in about once a year to make sure my eating habits are still fairly healthy. And no one else on the internet seems to have a recipe builder app that is as good as theirs.
I have to agree with you there on the recipe builder app. I’ve tried lots of free services over the last 6-8 months and haven’t been pleased with any of them. I was leary about paying for a service that all sorts of other places have for free, but the reviews fro MFD were outstanding. I figured I’d pay for a month and see how it went. I can always cancel at any time. So far I’m impressed. It’s helped me out alot already. I’m going to talk about it more once I have myself sort of together lately. I’m still playing around with things on my end.
thanks for the recipe. They certainly look yummy!
Ooh, I’ll have to check out myfooddiary
Thanks!
These look really good. I have a question – I’ve read before about subbing in apple sauce for oil. Does that change the taste or more specifically, the sweetness, at all, since the sugar remains the same? I imagine they’d be a bit more moist as well. I can’t believe it cuts the calories in half though, that’s awesome.
Hmm I just realized if I start using myfooddiary I’m going to have to start measuring my recipes, aren’t I?
I will say sometimes you have to play with the recipe a little. I substitute yogurt for butter alot and find I have to jiggle things a bit sometimes, except with the home-baked bread.
And yeah, measuring the recipe (or at least rough estimates) would be a bit of a help. I’m enjoying myfooddiary.com alot.
pdf is a good idea! *thumbs up* Then I can keep all my favorite NEB recipes in a folder on my hd as well as printed out… for when I spill something on my binder and have to go and reprint. LOL
I need more plastic page sleeves.
I do the same thing. I have printed so many since I started this blog I’m gonna need another binder soon. LOL!
Thank you for such a great recipe! I just made these mini cupcakes in the low fat version (apple sauce to replace oil) and they are fantastic. Without the frosting they feel like mini muffins. With the creamcheese topping they are irresistible. I made them so my 2 year old daughter could get her cupcakes with some added nutrition. I’m planning to freeze half and then bring them to our 4th of July family party. They should be a fun one-bite sweet treat.
Keep doing this great work, we all appreciate it.