Carrot cake….make this one….enough said.
This is my from-scratch carrot cake recipe. I love a good flavoured carrot cake, this one is a meld of about 4 or 5 different recipes and has resulted in a wonderfully moist cake with dressing. I played around a bit and added an orange-flavoured and -coloured white choc ganache to the topping…but I love this cake’s flavour.
The ingredient list may seem like a lot, and it is, but it’s worth it. I promise…
The Cake:
1 cup oil
2 cups brown sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
zest and juice of one orange (optional, but this is something I don’t omit, I lazily add a drop of orange essence when I don’t want to do the zest and juice)
2.5 – 3 cups grated carrots
1 cup chopped pecan nuts
0.5 cups raisins (optional, I usually omit due to the audience that eats this carrot cake)
pinch of salt
3/4 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cinnamon powder
3 tsp baking powder
2 handfuls dessicated coconut
2 cups flour
Preheat oven to 180ºC. Grease appropriate baking pans.
Combine oil, eggs, vanilla essence, orange juice and zest in a bowl. Add the sugar and mix well.
Then add carrots, pecans, coconut and raisin. Combine and add the remaining ingredients all at once. Mix very well.
Pour mixture into well-greased baking pans and bake for ±45mins until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.
Allow cake to cool in the tin for about 15 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool. (Once cool, I have wrapped them in clingwrap and frozen them, this is the first time I have tried it, I hope it works out!)
The frosting (omnomnom-ness):
250g (or slightly less) tub of firm smooth cream cheese
125 g butter
500g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
250ml fresh cream (whipped to soft peaks) *Optional
Beat butter and cream cheese very well and add vanilla essence. Slowly beat in sifted icing sugar. If the icing is too soft, refridgerate until it is of good spreading consistency. Decorate as desired.
The fresh cream….I use this when I want to make a really lightly flavoured icing for the carrot cake. I slowly fold the whipped fresh cream into the cream cheese prior to refridgerating.
Use as desired to frost the cake. Refridgerate cake to set the icing. (also refridgerate prior to adding the ganache)
Decorate as you would like, in this particular one, I topped with an orange-flavoured and -coloured choc ganache, some sugar cages and edible flowers.
The orange white-choc ganache:
100ml fresh cream – heated
200g white choc
1 drop orange essence
1 drop orange colour (or one drop each of yellow and red colour)
Add choc to cream and let it melt well, mix and then add colour and essence.
Pour slowly over the top and sides of the cake. Decorate as desired.
Today was a blistering day and the frosting melted into a blob by the time I arrived at my mum’s place…so I tried my best to salvage what I could…and this is how it looked when it was eventually served. Not the best of salvage jobs but better than a blobby mess…hahahahaha
Serve and enjoy!
Love, Fehmz