Carrot Cake

Ingredients

• For the carrot cake sponge:
• 250ml vegetable oil (I used Olivio)
• 175g caster sugar
• 50g light brown sugar
• 4 eggs
• 140g carrots (2) (I actually used 3 big carrots and they only produced 140g because I grated them by hand and ate the end I couldn’t manage to grate!)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 225g self-raising flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1½ teaspoon ground cinnamon (I used rounded teaspoons, but I like it extra spicy)
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• A pinch of salt
• For the cream cheese frosting:
• 300g cream cheese (I used FF Philadaphia)
• 100g soft butter (I used Lurpak spreadable)
• 125g icing sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• The juice of ½ a lemon

Preparation Time: 20 minutes (Not if you are hand grating carrots it isn’t!)
Cooking Time: 30 minutes (almost exactly)
Serves: 8-10

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180°c. (I had my difficult oven at 170 and that worked fine)
2. Place the sugars, eggs, oil and vanilla into a bowl. Whisk them together so there are no lumps of sugar and it turns creamy.
3. Sieve the flour, salt, baking powder and spices into another bowl and using a dry whisk, mix them together.
4. Peel the carrots and then grate them.
5. Pour the egg, oil and sugar mixture into the dry ingredients and then mix them together so there are no lumps. Then stir in the carrot.
6. Grease and line two 20cm sandwich cake tins with greaseproof paper. Pour the cake batter evenly into both the tins.
7. Put the tins into the middle part of the oven and bake them for 30 minutes so they feel firm when touched on top and do not wobble in the middle. (I had to swap my two cakes around halfway through as the top one was cooking faster than the bottom one)
8. Remove the cakes from the tins and cool them on a wire rack until they have reached room temperature.
9. Sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and add all the other icing ingredients.
10. Using a hand whisk or spoon beat the mixture until it is thick, light and creamy with no lumps remaining.
11. On your serving platter or cake stand or plate, place the first layer of cake. Spoon on about a third of the cream cheese frosting and spread it evenly over the top.
12. Put the second layer of carrot cake on top and spread a further third of the icing (half of what’s left) over the top.
13. Using a pallet knife or butter knife, frost the sides of the cake with the remaining icing and either smooth it down or texture the surface as we did. (Try not to eat too much of the remaining icing, remember how much fat it consists of!)
14. If made in advance, refrigerate in a covered cake bin until ready to serve, then remove at least a couple of hours before serving at room temperature.

Overall marks out of 10 = 10

Courtesy of ReallyNiceRecipes.com My modifications are in italics.