Carrot Cake

Apparently, there haven’t been enough cakes in my blog, and since I use the tagline “Life & Cakes” that’s just a little silly. So here is how you can make my favouritest cake in the world! It is a recipe adapted from FoodStories amazing Carrot Cake recipe, but I have fiddled with it so much over the last year or so that I feel confident enough she won’t mind me posting my own version!

A major difference between most carrot cakes and mine stems from my love of butter. As much as I appreciate the need for the cake to be light and fluffy and use sunflower oil, I just refuse to believe it makes it better. When I finally had the balls to start tweaking the recipe (I had to make several cakes before I reached that stage. It was awful), the first thing I replaced was half the sunflower oil with butter. Upon tasting it Mr Bubble said “that is even better than the last one, did you change it?”. I became bolder. So here it is, my joyous Carrot Cake:

Ingredients

There’s Bicarbonate Soda in the picture, but I didn’t use any. I think I took it out because I thought we didn’t have any self raising flour!

For the cake:
300g soft light brown sugar
3 eggs
100ml sunflower oil
200ml butter, melted
300g Self Raising Flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp allspice
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp vanilla extract
350g-ish carrots, grated (I round up to the nearest carrot)
Zest of an orange
100g of walnuts and/or pecans (the shop seems to always run out of one or the other when I’m in so it’s pot luck which I’ll make)

For the icing:
500g icing sugar (yes, a whole box.)
100g butter, room temperature
250g cream cheese

Oven:
Preheat to 180°C

Method:

First, take your butter out of the fridge. Take 100g of it and leave on a plate somewhere in your kitchen where it won’t get in the way. You’ll thank me later. Next, pop the rest of your butter in a pan, and gently heat it until it melts. You don’t want to over-heat it, so just keep stirring until there’s nothing swimming about in it.

Next, pour your melted butter into a measuring jug and top up with sunflower oil. I find that 200g of butter gets me slightly more than 200ml of melted butter, so I like to pour it all into the same jug just to make sure. If you’re adjusting quantities, all you need to remember is that you need an equal fat to sugar to flour ratio. Next, weigh your sugar out. If your packet of sugar has been lost in the back of the cupboard for several months and isn’t quite as soft as the packaging describes it, you can pop it in the microwave for 10 seconds to soften it up. Just be careful, some microwaves are powerful enough to make caramel in that space of time! Pour your oil/butter combo onto the sugar, add the eggs and beat for a few minutes. You can use a electric mixer for this, or a wooden spoon. Don’t use a spatula, not matter how well it matches the bowl, it takes forever. It’s going to look a little split at this point, but that is totally ok.

Now, mix together your flour, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and salt and sift it into the mixture, a third at a time, to make it easier to stir in. Once this is done, add some vanilla essence, and the zest of an orange. Finally, chuck in your carrots, and half of the nuts, chopped up quite coarsely. Save the whole ones for decorating your cake later. When It’s ready to go in the cake tin, it will look like this. Don’t worry. That’s exactly how it should look. I only have two cake tins, so I make an enormous two tier cake, but convention would have it that you use 3 cake tins, and stack accordingly. Regardless of the quantity of tins you are using, I would recommend greasing your cake tin really well if you are using cheap baking parchment. I learned the hard way – baking paper tastes crap. It’s pretty important to get the cakes in the oven pretty sharpish, it means that you will get to eat them sooner, so I forgot to take a photo of this step. I’m sure you can imagine putting two cakes in the oven. It will take at least 40 minutes to bake, possibly even more. Keep checking back, but try to not open the oven door too often. Some recipes on the BBC website claim the cake will be ready in 30 minutes, but when I checked mine at that point it was still raw. You’ll know it’s ready if you press it lightly with your finger and the cake bounces back at you.

Once your cakes are ready they will need to cool completely. This is by far the hardest part of the whole process – not eating them while you wait. In the meantime you can busy yourself making the icing. I do mine by hand, because I like to prentend that is a legitimate form of exercise, but a hand mixer will do the job just fine.

Your butter will have been out and softening for a good hour or so by now, so your life will be much easier. Pop it in a bowl and empty the whole box of icing sugar on to of it (through a sieve, if you would). It really doesn’t look like much when you get stirring.

Add the cold cream cheese and keep beating until it is nice and glossy

You want it to look like this. Any more and it will get gloopy.Now for the fun part! Make sure your cakes are completely cool. Patience is a virtue. When you are sure they are definitely cool, spread just less than half of the mixture on the bottom tier and place the other one on top. Pour the rest of the icing on the top, and spread evenly. If you have one, use a pallet knife, but a spatula will do just as well.