Carrot cake is pretty high up there on my list of favourite cakes. It is my husband’s birthday today so I whipped up this delicious cake to celebrate. This recipe is great because it makes quite a high cake which always looks nice. I love decorating cakes simply by adding chopped nuts, fruit and seeds. It looks effective and it quick to do.
Ingredients:
Carrot Cake
– 4 eggs
– 2 C white sugar
– 1 cup oil
– 3 C carrot, grated
– 2 C flour
– 2 t cinnamon
– 1 t mixed spice
– 1 t ground ginger
– 1/4 t salt
– 2 t baking soda
– 1 T lemon juice
– 1 C walnuts, chopped
– 1/2 C sultanas
Lemon Cream Cheese Icing
– 75g butter, softened
– zest and juice of 1 lemon
– 4 C icing sugar, sifted
– 250g cream cheese
Decorating
– chopped walnuts
– chopped apricots
– pumpkin seeds
- Preheat oven to 160 °C. Line a 23cm cake tin with baking paper.
- Place eggs, sugar and oil in an electric mixer and beat to combine.
- Add carrot, flour, cinnamon, mixed spice, ginger and salt. Mix until just combined.
- Dissolve baking soda in lemon juice and fold into cake mixture with walnuts and sultanas.
- Transfer mixture into prepared tin and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes but check on cake from 1 hour onward as each oven varies. Cake is cooked when a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
- Cool in cake tin for 15 minutes before transferring to cooling rack to completely cool before icing.
- For icing, beat together butter, lemon zest, lemon juice, icing sugar and cream cheese in electric mixer until smooth. Spread over the top of cooled carrot cake.
- Sprinkle chopped walnuts, apricots and pumpkin seeds around the edge of the cake.
