Carrot Cake

            Carrot cake brings back childhood memories for many. This recipe is moist, dense and not too sweet – a fantastic tea time treat. This cake works well if you bake it one day and let it rest in the tin overnight before icing it. Once iced, the cake must be kept in the fridge and will be good for about three days, although we’ve never had enough left to go any longer than that! If you’d like to make it a bit more adult, try soaking the sultanas in 3 tbsp of dark rum for the night before you bake the cake. One last tip – always use full fat cream cheese as the fat content is needed for the icing to keep its form. The diet kind makes the icing too runny to be used.

Ingredients

Cake:

  • 300g plain flour

  • 2 tsp cinnamon

  • 1 tsp baking powder

  • ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

  • 200g soft dark brown sugar

  • 4 eggs

  • 250ml sunflower oil

  • The zest of 1 orange

  • The zest of 1 lemon

  • 200g grated carrot

  • 150g sultanas

  • 227g tin of pineapple pieces, well drained and crushed with a fork into slivers

 

Cream Cheese Icing:

  • 125g unsalted butter at room temperature

  • 50g icing sugar, sifted

  • 250g full fat cream cheese

  • 1tsp vanilla extract    

            Pre-heat the oven to 150C / 300F / Gas Mark 2. Line a 20cm cake tin, making sure that the baking paper is at least 10cm high so that the top of the cake does not scorch when baking.

            Sift the flour, cinnamon, baking   powder and bicarbonate of soda together into a large bowl, then stir in the sugar and sultanas until the sultanas are well coated in the flour mix. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the oil and zests, then stir in the grated carrots and fold everything into the large bowl. Fold in the crushed pineapple without over-stirring the mixture. Scrape the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 1 hour 20 mins or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool the cake in the tin.

            For the cream cheese icing, beat the softened butter and icing sugar together until smooth and creamy, then beat in the vanilla extract and cream cheese. Chill the icing until it’s thick and spreadable. Spread the icing in a thick layer on the top of the cake, making sure that the icing continues the line of the sides of the cake.

Kaarina Leong-Smith.