Many dessert recipes can often be hard to execute, however, for this carrot cake recipe it was certainly not the case.
Carrot cakes are adored for their moist sponge, which they get from the grated carrots.
To make it extra tasty, it is topped off with a cream cheese frosting and this recipe has a touch of orange and walnuts.
To make my carrot cake, I follow the BBC’s recipe that they hailed as “easy”.
I found the cake incredibly quick to put together, but because it is baked in a single layer, it needed to cook slowly all the way through to the centre so it resulted in a dense, moist carrot cake that wasn’t too sweet.
Ingredients
For the sponge
Four eggs, at room temperature
200ml vegetable or sunflower oil, plus extra for the tin
250g carrots, coarsely grated
100g sultanas or raisins
100g chopped walnut pieces, plus extra for decoration
One orange, zest only
200g self-raising flour
Two teaspoons mixed spice
One teaspoon baking soda
A quarter teaspoon salt
200g light brown sugar
For the cream cheese frosting
150g unsalted butter
Three tablespoons caster sugar
300g full-fat cream cheese, at room temperature
Method
I started off by weighing out all the ingredients listed, grating the carrots, zesting the orange and chopping up the walnuts.
After, I preheated the oven to 170 Fan can greased and lined a deep cake tin with vegetable oil and baking parchment.
I then started to get to work on the cake batter. For this, I cracked the eggs into a large bowl and lightly whisked them using a fork. Next, I added in the vegetable oil and whisked again before stirring in the grated carrots, sultanas, walnut pieces and orange zest.
In a separate large bowl, I sifted together the flour, mixed spice, baking soda and salt and stirred in the sugar.
I then added the wet carrot mixture to the dry ingredients and combined them, making sure there were no pockets of flour.
Into the lined tin, I poured the mixture in and baked it on the middle shelf for one hour, until the cake had risen and is golden-brown all over.
I then removed the cake from the oven and set it aside in the tin to cool for 15 minutes before turning the cake out and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
While the carrot cake was cooling, I made the frosting. To do so, I placed the softened butter in a large bowl with the caster sugar, beating it for around two minutes until light and creamy. Then I stirred in the cream cheese until smooth.
After placing the cake on a stand, I used a palette knife to spread the frosting over the top and sides of the cake and scattered more walnuts on the top.
Make sure the cake is completely cold before adding the frosting. That was the one mistake I made as I found that the frosting kept sliding off. To fix this I left the cake in the fridge for a short while for it to chill a little.
With its perfect amount of spice, super moist crumb, and velvety cream cheese frosting, this cake was a big hit with my family.