Candied carrots

It's nuts to be so crazy about carrots. Not just any carrots but baby candied carrots. The idea for these came from my longtime friend Ms Saltwater many years ago when she would have people over to her new apartment and cook beautiful gourmet meals. Here we would spend an afternoon lazing about and eating her wonderful food.


Since then I've roasted baby carrots using an infinite variety of spices but this one using maple syrup and cinnamon remains my favourite. Ms Saltwater uses honey which is equally as good and I vary it between honey and maple syrup depending on what's in the pantry. Needless to say, please don't use the maple flavoured fake syrup. If no other option, I think the better choice is to even use brown sugar.


There's really not too much to the recipe but the results are thoroughly mouthwatering. The majority of the work is done by the maple syrup and the oven to turn these into sweet little morsels that I can eat on their own. But they are also perfect with any sort of roasted meat or Morrocan inspired dish either vegetarian or with meat. We had these sweet little carrots as a side to a roasted garlic and lemon lamb and it was utterly delicious.




Candied carrots
Serves 2 as side dish

Ingredients:
1 bunch of baby Dutch carrots
2 Tbs maple syrup or honey
2 tsp cinnamon
2 Tbs olive oil
S&P

1. Preheat oven to 180C
2. Cut off the green tops of the baby carrots leaving about 1cm for presentation. Peel the carrots. 3. Line a baking tray with baking paper
4. Place carrots, maple syrup, cinnamon, olive oil and S&P in the tray. Mix all ingredients until well combined.
5. Bake for about 40-45 minutes until carrots are dark golden brown.