Carrot cake, carrot cake & Carrot Cake!

Ok, so everyone has their favourite carrot cake recipe, but there's no harm in trying different ones - especially if for some silly reason you can't remember which recipe book has your favourite carrot cake recipe in, or you've gone through all your recipe books already and, unaware of course, have turned over two pages - the one with the treasured carrot cake recipe!

So I tried the recipe from Grandma's Best Recipes (I think it's been updated since I bought mine at ASDA about 3 years ago!)

'Grandma's' Classic Carrot Cake' (serves 12)
125g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
1t ground cinnamon
125g soft brown sugar
2 eggs
100ml sunflower oil
125g carrot, peeled and finely grated
25g desiccated coconut
25g walnuts chopped
walnut pieces to decorate
Icing:  50g softened butter; 50g soft cheese; 225g icing sugar; 1t lemon juice.

First problem - no self-raising flour, fortunately good old baking powder is always willing to be used!

Second problem - no walnuts! Surely you can't make a carrot cake without walnuts?! Of course you can, especially if you substitute Almonds!!!


And if you look carefully that spice jar is empty!

1. Preheat oven to 180C and lightly grease a cake tin - I never measure to see if it's the right size! - line the base with baking paper - sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. If I had Spray & Cook of course I wouldn't be wiping butter papers over my cake tin or lining it!

2. Sift the flour - and the baking powder, 1 teaspoon for every cup of flour - salt & ground cinnamon and stir in the brown sugar.

3.  Add the eggs and oil and mix well.

4. Stir in the grated carrot - not very 'finely grated' this time! - desiccated coconut and chopped ....nuts!

5.  Pour into tin and bake 20-25mins.

6. Icing: Beat butter, soft cheese (Philly cheese!), icing sugar and lemon juice until the mixture is fluffy and creamy.

7. Turn the cake out of the tin, cut into squares and then spread the icing over. Decorate with .... nuts - or not!

(At least the picture looks good!)

 

 

 

 

The recipe I was really aiming for is the Mega carrot cake, the recipe was in the May 2009 Asda magazine.

Zest and juice of 1 large orange
175g sultanas
150g pecans, roughly chopped (not quite my substitute almonds!)
300g Self-raising flour
2 level tsps bicarbonate of soda
75g desiccated coconut
3 large eggs
250g light soft brown sugar
220ml sunflower oil
300g carrots (peeled weight) grated
Icing:
100g butter softened
100g icing sugar
1T lemon juice
few drops of vanilla extract
300g full fat soft and creamy cheese

1. Preheat oven to 160C and prepare cake tin (said it all before, you know what to do!)
2. Put the orange zest, 2T juice and the sultanas in a bowl and leave for 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile put the nuts on a baking tray and cook in the oven for 8 minutes.
4. Sift the flour, spice and bicarb, add half the nuts and coconut.
5. Whisk eggs, sugar and oil until sugar starts to dissolve.
6. Stir in sultanas and juice, carrots and flour.
7. Bake in tin for 1 hour.

Icing:
Beat butter and icing sugar then stir in lemon juice, vanilla and cream cheese. Spread over the cake, sprinkle with nuts and then cut into slices.

This last recipe sounds more fiddly, but it's really moist and gooood!