The last of the carrot crop

 I dug up the last of my carrot crop back on the twelfth of the month and the final few are still sat on the bottom of the fridge.  They really need to be consumed and today I made my token contribution.

One of the first meals that I cooked for 30% was a roast lamb dinner and I had baked a carrot cake for dessert. This was back in 2002 and I don't think I have baked another in the intervening years.  The cake must have been pretty good, as 30% still speaks very fondly of it, and it only took her the best part of twenty years to agree to marry me.

Anyway, back to the narrative. A few days ago 30% suggested that it would be nice to make a carrot cake with some of our carrots, as they are very sweet.  I very rarely bake,* so I was a little apprehensive, but I didn't take a huge amount of convincing that this was a good idea.  I no longer had the recipe so successfully used to woo 30%, so I scoured the internet for an alternative.

The BBC Good Food website came to my rescue with the recipe detailed below. I did have to adjust the ingredient quantities, as the original was for a 20 cm cake tin and mine are 23 cm.

Ingredients & Method

- Oil two baking tins and line with baking parchment

- Pre heat oven to 160 ℃ (fan)

• 290 ml vegetable oil
• 125g plain yoghurt
• 5 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla essense
• the zest from 3/4 of an orange

- Place the above ingredients in a jug and whisk together

• 330g self raising flour
• 420g soft brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a good pinch of salt

- Place the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well, ensuring that there are no lumps.

• 330g grated carrots
• 125g rasins or sultanas
• 65g of roughly chopped walnuts

- Finally mix the wet ingredients with the dry ones and stir in the carrots, raisons and chopped walnuts. 
- Mix well and divide between two cake tins
- The recipe suggested a bake of 25 - 30 mins, although feedback indicated that forty minutes was more realistic. Note: With the increased quantities and larger tins, my bake was about an hour
- Place in the oven and bake until a skewer comes out clean. 
- Once cooked, remove from the oven and leave to cool on a rack in the cake tins 

Once the cake has cooled it can be iced, but it also freezes well. As we are off to Egypt on Monday, I did exactly that. The two cakes were double wrapped in clingfilm and then finished with a jacket of aluminium foil, before being put in the freezer.  They'll be thawed and iced much nearer to Christmas.

Icing Ingredients and Method

• 125g slightly salted butter
• 375g icing sugar
• 125g full fat cream cheese

- Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth
- Add half of the cream cheese and beat again
- Beat in the remaining cheese bit by bit, to prevent the icing splitting
- Use half of the icing as a filling and the remainder as a topping 

- Sprinkle 65g of chopped walnuts on the top 

So, there you go. Friday's achievement was a carrot cake. I'll let you know how it turns out later next month.

Note to self: Reviews of this recipe question the icing ingredients, suggesting that the quantities are insufficient and that there is far too much icing sugar.

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* Apart from the bakery course at Butter Street on the nineteenth of October, the last time I baked was when I made a sourdough loaf during lockdown. If I'm honest, I don't think the "reward" of a sourdough loaf is worth the faff of making a sourdough starter ...I'm not a fan.