Carrot Cake – My Best Cake EVER!

CARROT CAKE

I don't often bake cakes, as its far too dangerous. What I am trying to say is, that if I cooked cakes on a regular basis, I would end up weighing 50 stone!!! My very good friend and work colleague Caraline is leaving our team this week and we had a little party at lunchtime today. I made my first Carrot Cake last night and it turned out to be the best tasting cake I have ever made – even though I say so myself!!! It was consumed very quickly by the girls at work!

I adapted the recipe slightly and added vanilla essence and juice/zest of an orange to the topping ingredients and baking powder and cinnamon to the main cake mixture. Here is the recipe:

CAKE INGREDIENTS

• 250ml Olive Oil
• 250g Coarsely Grated Carrots
• 3 Large Eggs
• 225g Light Muscovado Sugar
• 225g Allinson Wholemeal Self-Raising Flour
• 1 teaspoon of Baking Powder
• 1 teaspoon of Ground Cinnamon

TOPPING INGREDIENTS

• 250g Mascarpone Cheese
• 25g Billington's Unrefined Golden Icing Sugar (I couldn't find this, so just used normal bog standard icing sugar, but used around 100g!)
• Zest of one orange and 5 teaspoons of orange juice
• Vanilla Essence – 1 teaspoon
• Chopped walnuts for decorating

METHOD

1. Preheat the oven to 180˚C/Fan 160˚C/gas mark 4. Grease and line a 20cm (8") cake tin with grease proof paper.
2. Whist the oil and sugar together, then whisk in the eggs one at a time
3.  Gently fold in the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, followed by the carrots. Mix gently until combined then turn into the prepared tin.
4. Bake for 40 minutes (allow much longer than recipe states! Open oven at 60 mins and then check) until golden brown and skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
5. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out and cool on a wire rack.
6. Mix together the mascarpone cheese, icing sugar, orange zest, juice and vanilla essence. Split the cake in half and sandwich together with half of the mascarpone mixture and then spread the remainder on top (with palette knife). Finish with Walnuts (I also added Tesco's 'Gold Crisp Pearls' and 'Gold Glimmer Crunch' to the centre of the cake).

S C R U M P T I O U S ! ! !