Sunday 2 August 2009

carrot cake

It's been a little busy at work and my time has also been spent studying and trying to finish an assessment so the backlog of posts has built up once again. Fortunately, I'm back up and running and I can finally spend time to visit all my favourite blogs and catch up on everything in the world of eating.

A couple of weeks back, I made the Carrot Cake from 'In the Kitchen'. This makes it Recipe #11 and #12 from the book and was actually one of the first full cakes that I'd baked in years. I used to bake a lot of big cakes but somehow or other, that sorta stopped happening and I caught onto the craze of cupcakes and other small cakes. Muffins are my favourite and often most of my big cake recipes are converted into things that resemble muffins.

This carrot cake recipe asked for quite a number of ingredients which would usually turn me away from the recipe but in this instance, I actually had most of them at home. Here's the batter of flour, cinnamon, mixed spice, eggs, sugar, vanilla, oil and salt.
Add hazelnuts, walnuts and sultanas.
Mix it all together with the grated carrot.
Pour into a lined 23cm cake tin.
Bake for an hour. I ended up baking it for the additional 10 minutes that the recipe suggested.
Once the cake has cooled, top with Cream Cheese Frosting (the recipe for this is so simple - cream cheese, caster sugar and lemon juice).
Carrot Cake!
Carrot cake innards.
Mum liked this cake more than I did. In her words, it was 'healthy tasting', which it was but I prefer a carrot cake that's slightly sweet and really, when you call a cake 'healthy', it really isn't quite a cake! Anyway, I blame it on mum who told me to reduce the amount of sugar when I was making it so that could've been the reason why the recipe didn't seem to work out as well as all the other recipes I've tried out of this book.

And with the amount of time it took to cook this in the oven, the edges did get a little burnt. Reminder to self, any cake that goes in the oven for more than an hour needs to be triple and quadruply lined - I keep forgetting!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's been way too long since I had a carrot cake and I love the slathering of cream cheese icing you put on yours! It's true, carrot cake is good as most of the things are in the cupboard!

Bean Sprout's Cafe said...

Oh, what are you studying now? Thats why I haven't heard from you quite long time :P

I used to make carrot cake (I love to eat) but think that grating the carrot is so troublesome..hehe.

And I was laughing when read about reducing sugar..haha.. You mum is so cute !

panda said...

nqn - carrot cake has to come with cream cheese frosting! it's a must!

beansprout - i've been doing a cert. of diet and nutrition by correspondence and the assessment is due in two weeks so i've been busy studying :( and lol, i'm not a big fan of grating carrots or grating things cause i always seems to grate myself as well. hahah..i'll tell mum that you think she's cute!!