Carrot Cake Baked Oatmeal
This delicious carrot cake baked oatmeal recipe will be your new go-to sweet snack! It’s made entirely with whole food ingredients and it comes with vegan cashew cream cheese frosting. Bake up a batch on Sunday, and enjoy it all week long.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen all the incredible variations of baked oats. This carrot cake baked oatmeal was inspired by… you guessed it, carrot cake! Except it’s a hundred times easier to make, and it’s made with whole food ingredients. It’s the kind of dessert you will be making regularly because it’s just THAT GOOD.
I admit, I am a little bit biased because I love oatmeal. Oats naturally take on the flavor of whatever they are served with. As a result, you can enjoy delicious oatmeal that tastes like apple pie, cinnamon rolls, or cappuccino. The recently published PlantYou Cookbook features four recipes of breakfast oatmeal cookies, including this one. So if you love oats as much as I do, you’re gonna love this carrot cake baked oatmeal!
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
- This is essentially a carrot cake… but healthier! It only uses whole food ingredients including oats, carrots, walnuts, and maple syrup. The frosting is homemade too, and it takes less than 5 minutes to make!
- Unlike the classic carrot cake, this baked oatmeal is naturally wheat- and gluten-free. However, if you have a severe allergy, I would advise buying certified gluten-free oats.
- It’s a perfect meal prep breakfast! Take some time on a Sunday to make this, and if you can resist eating the entire tray in one go, you’ve got yourself an easy, grab-and-go breakfast.
- The recipe itself is very simple. The ingredients can be mixed right in the baking dish (no extra washing up!) and the prep takes only about 10 minutes.
- If you have kids, this is a great “entry-level” baking recipe that’s very hard to mess up! Enjoy bonding with your little ones over baking!
How to Make This Recipe
Round up your ingredients. Line a 9×13 inch dish (or similar) with parchment and preheat the oven to 375 F. Alternatively, grease the dish with some oil or vegan butter.
Add all the dry ingredients into a baking dish. This includes oats, oat flour, baking powder, and spices. Next, add your wet ingredients – carrot, yogurt, plant milk, maple syrup, and vanilla extract. Give everything a good mix until the contents of the pan are fully combined.
Top your oats with crushed walnuts and bake for 50-55 minutes until the dish firms up. In the meantime, you can make the cream cheese frosting by blending cashews, yogurt, lemon juice, maple syrup, and lemon zest.
Once the carrot cake baked oatmeal is ready, allow it to fully cool down. Then, ice it with the frosting and enjoy!
Hack It!
- If you haven’t got access to oat flour, you make your own in a food processor or coffee grinder. Simply grind some oats until you get a fine flour.
- For a nut-free version, you can use sunflower or pumpkin seeds. As for the frosting, you can blend up some plain tofu instead of the cashews.
- You can enjoy this baked oatmeal without the frosting, too – kind of like carrot cake flapjacks!
- It’s possible to make a similar baked oatmeal dish using zucchini. Bear in mind, zucchini has higher water content, so you may want to squeeze the moisture out before adding zucchini into the pan.
- Generally speaking, you can use any type of vegan yogurt, as long as it’s unsweetened. I used coconut yogurt because it tends to be thick and creamy, but soy or almond yogurt would work just as well.
Other Recipes You’ll Love
- Stovetop Oatmeal Five Ways
- Vegan Rice Pudding
- Vegan Pumpkin Latte Brownies
- Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp
- Vegan Yogurt Bark
If you love planning and prepping your meals, check out the PlantYou Planner! It’s a digital meal planner with over 550 beginner-friendly vegan recipes for you to choose from. Once you’ve selected your weekly menu from the database, the program generates a shopping list, and you can even adjust the number of servings for each recipe/ Plant-based living has never been easier!
And in case you haven’t got your hands on a copy of the PlantYou Cookbook, you may want to call your local bookstore! The book contains over 140 recipes (including those delicious oatmeal breakfast cookies!) for every occasion and every taste. This is the book I wish I had when I first went plant-based!
The Recipe: Carrot Cake Baked Oatmeal
Ingredients
- 2 cups rolled oats
- ¾ cup oat flour
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 1 ½ tsp baking powder
- 1 ½ cups grated carrot
- 2 cups unsweetened cashew milk, or other plant milk
- ½ cup unsweetened vegan yogurt, I used coconut yogurt
- ⅓ cup maple syrup
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- ¼ cup crushed walnuts, and more for topping
Cashew Cream Cheese Icing
- 1 cup cashews, unsalted
- 1 cup unsweetened coconut yogurt
- ½ lemon, juiced
- ¼ cup maple syrup
- ½ lemon, zested
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375F and grease or line a 9 x 13 baking dish with parchment paper.
- Add all of the dry ingredients apart from the walnuts to the baking dish, including the oats, oat flour, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger. Mix. Then add the wet ingredients, including the carrot, yogurt, maple syrup, plant milk and vanilla. Stir until fully combined.
- Top with crushed walnuts if desired, and place in the oven for 50 to 55 minutes until cooked through.
- While the baked oatmeal cooks, you can make the cashew cream cheese icing by adding all listed ingredients to a high speed blender or food processor. Combine until smooth, and ice the top of the oatmeal once cooled. Store the oatmeal in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.
