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Weekend Carrot Cake

This weekend I am having my first house guests in my new home, so for me this means one thing - the perfect excuse to bake! Whilst watching some daytime TV on Friday, it came up that carrot cake was the nations favourite flavour, and knowing that these friends were fans I decided that would be the cake of the weekend.



This makes a 3 layer cake, with a 10 cm diameter - to make one normal size cake double the ingredients.

Ingredients:

110 g light muscovado sugar
110ml sunflower oil
150g self raising flour
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice
50g sultanas
110g grated carrot

For the icing:
60g butter
60g soft cheese
250g icing powder

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C/  170C fan assisted. Grease 3 small cake tins if you want the small cake as I made, or two larger tins for the bigger cake.

Beat together the sugar, oil and eggs with a hand beater until they are well combined. Add in the flour, spices and sultanas and when these are incorporated into the batter add the carrot and mix. 

Pour into the cake tins and bake for around 20 mins. To make sure they are cooked, do the skewer test - if it comes out with batter on put them back in for another 5 minutes.

Leave to cool fully on wire racks. You can now make your icing ready for when the cakes are cool.

Soften the butter in the microwave and then add in the soft cheese. Beat with the hand mixer until it is really smooth. Add in the icing sugar a little at a time - if you put it all in at once your kitchen will get filled with an icing dust cloud as you try to beat it in! Mix the icing really well as we don't want any lumps.

When the cakes are cool, fill a piping bag, snip the end off and pipe the icing onto the cakes. Sandwich the layers together and finish with a layer of icing on the top.

If you want to make the cake extra special you can make little carrots out of sugar paste icing, but I chose not to do that this time.

Take a large slice and enjoy with friends and a nice cup of tea! 






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