Wow! How did Friday come around so quickly? It seems like only yesterday I was waxing lyrical about the homemade Twixes (has anybody tried to make them yet?), but here I am a week later sharing another recipe with you. As the saying goes, “time flies when you’re having fun.” Anyway, today’s recipe should be a savoury one, working on my unofficial schedule of sweet one week / savoury the next. However, as I said in yesterday’s post, this week is National Baking Week in the UK and I felt it would have been criminal to blog a savoury recipe, so am going with another sweet one. For all you savoury fans, don’t fret, it’ll be back next week. Now, these pages could easily become awash with chocolate recipes – you all know how much I love chocolate, and whilst that would please me no end, I fear I would quickly lose a lot of readers. So with this in mind, today’s recipe is for my scrumptious (well The Domestic Prince tells me it is!) carrot cake with an orange cream cheese frosting. Some of you may be looking at the picture saying: “hhhmmm, that doesn’t look like cream cheese frosting to me!” Well, you’d be right in thinking that, but I promise the ingredients I used, are the ones listed below, it’s just the cream cheese was frozen and then defrosted (Bangalore has a shortage of cream cheese some days, so I keep a stock in the freezer). And whilst cooking with previously frozen cream cheese is perfectly fine, uummmm making cream cheese frosting with it clearly isn’t. Hence the more of a glazed frosting look, rather than a nicely fluffy cream cheese one. Despite how it looks, the taste is exactly the same. I hope you can all forgive me?
Makes a 2lb loaf
Ingredients
For the carrot cake
- 200ml unflavoured oil (something like vegetable or sunflower)
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 125g light soft brown or light muscovado sugar
- 75g golden syrup
- 200g plain flour
- 1tsp baking powder
- 1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1tsp ground ginger
- 1/2tsp cinnamon
- 1/2tsp mixed spice
- 1/2tsp salt
- 200g carrot, grated
For the orange cream cheese frosting
- 150g icing (powdered) sugar
- 25g unsalted butter, room temperature
- 65g full-fat cream cheese, cold
- 2tbsp orange marmalade (I like one with the peel in, as it gives it more of a tang against the sweetness of the icing sugar)
Method
- Pre-heat the oven to 160C (fan).
- Line a 2lb loaf tin. I use these loaf liners, as life is too short to be faffing about lining a loaf tin!
- In a free-standing mixer (or a bowl and hand whisk), whisk the oil, eggs, sugar and golden syrup until they are all combined.
- Slowly sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, ginger, cinnamon, mixed spice and salt into the wet ingredients.
- Stir in the grated carrots and pour the mixture into the prepared loaf tin.
- Place on the middle shelf of the oven and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean.
- Leave the cake to cool in the tin for around 10 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.
- In your food processor, put the icing sugar, unsalted butter, cream cheese and orange marmalade and whizz until all the ingredients have come together. If you don’t have a food processor, beat the cream cheese and butter together and add the icing sugar a spoonful at a time (this will help limit the icing sugar going everywhere). Once all the icing sugar has been incorporated, beat in the marmalade.
- Smooth the frosting on top of the loaf cake and serve!
Domestic Princess tips:
- Don’t use frozen and thawed cream cheese for your frosting!
- Don’t overbeat the cream cheese, as this can make it runny.
- If not using a food processor to make the frosting, I’d suggest buying a peel-free marmalade, unless you fancy chopping up the peel before adding it in!
- Feel free to swap the plain flour for wholemeal flour, as that works well too.
- If you don’t want an orange frosting, just omit the marmalade.
- This cake freezes really well. Wrap tightly in foil before freezing.
- Bangaloreans, loaf tin liners can be purchased from Lifestyle on Richmond Road.
So, there you have it – a cake recipe from me that didn’t involve chocolate! Carrot cake counts as one of our five a day, right?! So it must be positively good for us…
With much love
The Domestic Princess
xoxo
