The last few days I've been craving a slice of carrot cake because it's one of my favourite cakes. I used to hate it as a child, I think mostly because it had a vegetable in it to be perfectly honest. However, I have also tasted some pretty awful carrot cakes, often they're dry and sometimes full of nuts and dried fruit. Now I love nuts, but not a fan of them in cakes; I am however not keen on raisins or any other dried fruits so any cake with them puts me off. I turned to the internet to find inspiration for my homemade carrot cake. I took ideas from several different recipes, partially restricted by what ingredients I had at home as I had no intentions of going to the shop today. Pretty pleased with what I came up with as is the rest of the family!
Ingredients
Cake batter
- 3 eggs
- 200 ml white sugar
- 100 ml brown sugar (if I hadn't had any in I would've used white instead for all of it but saw it recommended for more moisture in one of the recipes)
- 300 ml flour
- 500 ml grated carrot
- 150g melted butter
- 1tsp vanilla extract/sugar
- 2tsp ground cinnamon
- 1tsp ground cardamom
- 0.5tsp ground ginger
- 1 pinch of salt
Icing
- 200g soft cheese
- 50g room temperature butter
- 300ml icing sugar
- 1tbs lemon juice
Method
Heat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius (fan oven). Beat the eggs and sugar well then add the rest of the ingredients and whisk well. It really is that easy. I used a 35x27cm cake tin covered with baking paper although could've worked just as well with butter and breadcrumbs or flour on the bottom. I'd consider doing it in a slightly smaller tin to get it slightly thicker although I'm fan of bite size slices so for our family it was a pretty ideal thickness. I cooked it for 45-50 minutes then left it to cool on a cool surface. It smells divine, the spices make this cake, plus it is super easy and so moist!
While the cake baked I prepared the icing. I used a small blender to get a nice smooth consistency as the electric whisk wasn't really doing it. The lemon juice gives it a nice little kick so it's not just sweet and it helps bring out the flavours of the cake. May be a bit runny for some so will see if I come up with something equally tasty but firmer, personally I thought it just helped keep the cake moist. Which was what I was after ultimately. I let the mixture sit in the fridge while the cake cooled down, then the girls got to spread the icing over the cake before we tried it. I sprinkled some grated carrot, cinnamon and icing sugar over the top, not a necessity but it made it look that little bit nicer.
Hope you enjoy it as much as we did! I'll definitely be making this again.
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