Carrot Cake with Pineapple (Gluten-Free )

The recipe was given to me by a long time family friend, Denise. She got this recipe from her grandmother on her mother's side. She remembers visiting her every summer in Costa Mesa.

I love keeping family recipes alive.

Our family was wholly traumatized when my Mamo passed away, and no one had bothered to write down the chiffon cake recipe.

This is THE cake that she had made for ALL the grandkids and ALL the great-grandkids for birthdays over the years. Losing this recipe made me realize how important it is to hold on to these memories.

(If you are wondering, we were able to finally find the infamous chiffon cake recipe. I will be posting that story here as well.)

The original recipe is not a gluten-free recipe.

Denise is gluten intolerant, so she has been making this recipe gluten-free for many years.

I tested it out, and I promise you will not miss the gluten. I made a few tiny substitutions and added a little extra spice to this cake. I made a note of my additions in the recipe in the recipe card.

Carrot cake is naturally a dense cake. The gluten-free flour does tend to make the cake even denser still. I don't mind this at all for carrot cake. The chunky walnuts, pineapple, and coconut add a great texture to this cake.

If you aren't trying to avoid gluten, feel free to swab in regular all-purpose flour.

Foodology Geek Recipe Notes

I mixed up this carrot cake batter in one bowl

The hardest part about making this carrot cake recipe is shredding the carrots.

You can mix all the wet ingredients with a wooden spoon.

I imagine this is probably the way Denise's grandma made it as well.

I sifted the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, gave it all a quick stir, and then poured the batter into my prepared cake pans.

You should use finely shredded coconut.

The original recipe calls for a can of shredded coconut. I have never ever seen this before.

I have since looked it up with our friend Google and you can order it, of course. 

I used unsweetened coconut, but I only had the large chunky flakes. I would definitely swap that out for the finely shredded coconut.

I feel like this cake is sweet enough, so I decided that unsweetened coconut was a better choice here.

Buy more walnuts.

I ran out of walnuts so I ended up dressing the top of the cake with pecans instead. Pecans are fine, but I usually like to keep it consistent.

All in all this Carrot Cake was a success.

The cream cheese frosting is delicious!

I really wanted to impress you buy piping some cute little orange carrots on top. But alas. My baking skill set is limited to just making sure that whatever I bake tastes amazing.

Unfortunately, the looks of my baked goods, with a rare exception, are always marginal at best. C'est la vie.

Some of my other favorite Spring dessert recipes are:

Banana Cream Pie

Banana Cake

Pineapple Sweet Rolls 

Cranberry Coffee Cake

Swedish Birthday Cake