Mmm Cake

Happy last day of July! There are now only 5 months left in the year – wow!

Today I follow up on a promise I made several weeks ago and share my favourite carrot cake recipe. This is a BIG cake and my go-to for a café style cake. You can make it as two cakes – ice one and freeze the other, or as one big cake. I made one last night to take to a community café and iced it this morning with every intention to photograph it for this. However, I ended up being pushed for time, and completely forgot about taking any pictures. And there weren’t any leftovers either.

What I like about this cake is that it’s pretty much fail proof. Some of the preparation takes a little bit of time, but it’s absolutely worth it. The oil makes it really moist and it’s full of carrot, apple and pineapple, so that must make it kind of healthy right? This is the recipe I used when I made mini carrot cakes in the straight-sided mini cake tin (check out the review here). My sister made these again last week, but reduced the cooking time, gaining a much better result in the tin – there wasn’t so much of a ‘crust’ so I'll willing to give them another chance.

Carrot Cake

420g (2 cups) castor sugar

315 ml (1 ¼ cups) canola oil

2 tsp vanilla essence

2 tsp grated lemon rind

3 eggs (lightly beaten)

270g (2 cups) carrots (peeled and grated)

195g (1 cup) apple (peeled and grated)

250g (1 cup) unsweetened crushed pineapple (drained)

65 ml (1/4 cup) pineapple juice (juice from the crushed pineapple)

40g (1/2 cup) desiccated coconut

420g (3 cups) flour

1 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celcius. Spray and line with baking paper two 8-inch round cake tins or one 10-inch cake tin. Ensure they’re at least 7.5cm deep
2. In a large bowl whisk together sugar, oil, vanilla and lemon rind with a hand whisk. Do not use an electric mixer as you will create too much air.
3. Add eggs and mix well. Stir in carrot, apple, pineapple, pineapple juice and coconut.
4. Sift dry ingredients, add to bowl and gently fold in.
5. Pour batter into prepared tin/s and bake for approximately 1 hour for the large cake or approximately 40 minutes for the smaller tins or until a cake skewer comes out clean, and the cake bounces back when prodded.
6. Allow cake/s to cool in tin for 10 minutes, then remove from tin and leave to cool completely on a cooling rack.

Ice with your favorite cream cheese icing recipe. I quite like a citrus cream cheese icing for this cake. I use the cream cheese icing recipe here and add the juice and rind of half a lemon.

Carrot cake recipe is adapted from Ruth Pretty Cooking at Springfield.

Enjoy!

H xo