Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

I love eating carrot cake. It's moist, lightly spiced, has a great texture and certainly doesn't make me feel like I'm eating a vegetable.

Not that I mind eating vegetables, being a vegetarian and all.

The only problem is, I hate making carrot cake. Grating five to six carrots, quite probably chipping a nail as I do so, is not my idea of fun.

Luckily for everyone else (except my housemate, who will probably be finding carrot gratings for weeks), I can be easily persuaded to make carrot cake.

I made this cake for my friend and colleague Karolina's birthday.

You will need:

For the cake:
225g self-raising flour
250ml sunflower oil
250g carrots, peeled and coarsely grated

½ tsp nutmeg

½ tsp cinnamon

large pinch of salt

225g soft light brown sugar

3 large eggs 

2 cake tins of the same size

a handful of pecan nuts, roughly chopped

For the icing:

225g cream cheese (such as Philadelphia)

25g icing sugar

50g butter at room temperature

1. Grease and line the cake tins and preheat the oven to 180C. Beat together the brown sugar and oil. Beat in the eggs one by one.

2. Mix together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and fold into the sugar mixture. 

3. Add the grated carrots and fold into the cake mixture.

4. Divide the mixture between the two tins and bake for 30 to 40 minutes. If a knife inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean it is ready. 

5. Leave the sponges to cool. Beat together the cream cheese, icing sugar and butter.

6. When the sponges are completely cool, spread the icing over the top of each sponge and stack one on top of the other.

And there you have it. 

Bye,

Ellie
xxx