During my senior year of college, one of my mom’s cousins and her husband drove their RV to California for a road trip in the spring. Although traveling for over two months, they ended up in our town just before Easter, so we invited them to our house for a special holiday meal.
Throughout my childhood, most of our Easter festivities happened first thing in the morning. Similar to our stockings on Christmas Day, my brother and I raced to the kitchen table to see what the Easter bunny had left in the plastic eggs in our wicker baskets, and we eagerly shook each one, squealing over what we found when we cracked them open: marshmallow Peeps, milk chocolate eggs, Starburst-flavored jelly beans, and sometimes even a few miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups wrapped in festive pastel-colored foil.
However, we usually kept our Easter dinners fairly simple, if we even cooked anything special at all… So that particular year when we hosted Mom’s cousin, we made a big effort to prepare an actual Easter meal!
Mom picked up a gigantic honey-baked ham from a local shop as the main course, and Dad volunteered to whip up some side dishes of sautéed asparagus, mashed potatoes, and a spinach salad. Always a baker, even back then, I offered to handle dessert and help Dad with making his whole wheat rolls from scratch.
Shortly before the holiday, I skimmed through one of my favorite cookbooks and picked out a classic single-layer carrot cake recipe. (Carrots… The Easter bunny… It seemed fitting!) I baked the cake in our well-worn metal 9×13” pan the day before, covered it with foil, and refrigerated it overnight.
After church the next morning, I whipped up a bowl of homemade cream cheese frosting, which I slathered all over the top of the cake in a beautifully thick layer. My carrot cake looked and smelled incredible — even better than most of the grocery store bakeries in town! — yet when the time came to serve it…
We all looked at each other with wide eyes. We didn’t have a platter big enough to hold the entire cake… And most of the adults completely forgot to save room for dessert!
I seem to remember eating carrot cake every day for the entire week after Easter… We had that much leftover — but at least it tasted amazing!
In hindsight, these Healthy Carrot Cake Thumbprint Cookies probably would’ve been a much better dessert for our little Easter dinner that year! They’re soft and chewy, bite-sized, perfectly portioned… And there are very few leftovers to worry about, especially compared to a big sheet cake!
These fun thumbprint cookies still have the same rich flavors as classic carrot cake… Including their sweet centers, which taste just like the cream cheese frosting often spread on top of carrot cake! Yet unlike traditional carrot cake recipes, these healthy carrot cake thumbprint cookies contain no refined flour or sugar… And they’re 42 calories!
Continue reading & see the rest! ›› Healthy Carrot Cake Thumbprint Cookies
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