Week 7: Carrot cake

I had it my mind this week to bake a cake. I’m not sure why I had this thought floating around my cerebrum, but there it was all the same. Perhaps it was the fact that it’s been a while since I cooked something sweet rather than savoury (back to Week 1 of this personal cooking challenge) or that the Orange Cake in my new Master Chef Everyday cookbook looks tasty enough to eat every day for a year. It may have even been the particular alignment of the moons in the heavens this week, but, without wishing to side-step the matter, this isn’t the place to philosophise about such things.

The fact is I decided to bake a cake. It was going to be the orange one, one which I thought I’d take to my convalescing friend Richard (broken leg after an incident combining beer, gravity and stairs – Rich and Jimmy pictured below) but it turns out that his favourite cake is carrot cake, a cake I’d never made before! So, a quick trawl of the internet and I get to Felicity Cloake’s How to make the perfect carrot cake from the Guardian website. This is a tremendous cake and as light and fluffy a carrot cake as you could hope to have, beats anything you’ll find in a shop and will even be a nose ahead of the tasty ones you find in those posh cafes in ‘up-and-coming’ areas of London. I will be making it again – rarely have I seen such wedges of cake gobbled up with quite so much alacrity.

150g butter, melted, plus extra for greasing	1 tsp ground cinnamon
150g soft light brown sugar	½ tsp grated nutmeg
3 free-range eggs	Zest of 1 orange
200g self-raising wholemeal flour	100g sultanas or raisins (I had a mix of both)
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda	200g carrots, peeled and grated
½ tsp salt	100g pecans, toasted and roughly chopped, plus extra to decorate

For the icing:	50g light brown soft sugar
150g full-fat cream cheese	Zest of ½ lemon and a squeeze of juice

Preheat the oven to 180ᵒC and grease and line the bases of 2 x 18cm sandwich tins

Put the melted butter, sugar and eggs into a large mixing bowl and whisk well until the ingredients are thoroughly combined and the mixture has almost doubled in volume – this will make it super light and fluffy.

Sift together the flour, bicarb, salt and spices and then fold very gently into the liquid mixture, being careful to knock as little air out as possible. Fold in the remaining ingredients and divide between the tins. Bake for about 30 minutes until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Keep an eye on it from 20 mins as you may find them browning up a little early. Cool in the tins.

Meanwhile, beat the icing ingredients together and refrigerate. When the cakes are cool enough to ice, remove from the tins, top one with half the icing, and then the other cake. Ice the top, and decorate with the remaining pecans. With the icing, consider ‘less is more’. It’s tasty stuff but the cake is pretty much good enough to eat on its own.

Today’s learning:
Whisking the melted butter, eggs and sugar together helped make the mixture amazingly light and moist, although this may have been the moisture from the carrots too.