Eggless Carrot Loaf

A carrot loaf made without eggs: dry ingredients and wet ingredients combined in one bowl, poured into a tin and baked. No country is named and none applies. It is a plain quick bread of the kind made everywhere. The lemon juice is doing chemistry rather than adding flavour. Mixed with milk it sours it into a substitute buttermilk, and that acid reacts with the baking soda to produce lift. In an eggless cake that reaction matters considerably more than usual, since there is no egg providing structure or aeration. Leaving the lemon juice out gives a dense, flat loaf. That is what makes it work at all. Eggless baking relies on the raising agents and on moisture, and this recipe has plenty of both: a cup of milk, three quarters of a cup of oil and a cup of grated carrot, which is largely water. The result is dense and moist rather than light, which the contributor describes accurately. Cream cheese frosting is suggested, which is the conventional carrot cake finish. The method is unusually brief, three steps, and the times given do not quite match, with a stated forty minutes against thirty in the method itself.