Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and caramelised walnuts

Bake number two for EHH’s birthday – carrot cake. Looking back through the blog, I haven’t made a carrot cake in absolutely ages, so this seemed like a great reason to make one. Digging out my recipe – beautifully handwritten by a work colleague while I was temping about 10 years ago – it was definitely time to make and therefore write up this recipe as the paper was rather worn and the handwriting fading!

I’m a big fan of carrot cake – I love the moist multi-textured cake and rich complex flavours, topped with a not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting. This is not a standard or traditional carrot cake due to the addition of banana, but I think that it is delicious! Unusually for carrot cake, there is no spice in this recipe - you could choose to add some but (although I love spice) I don't think that this cake needs it. The frosting is delicious and the addition of the caramelised walnuts makes it extra special.

This is a beautifully easy cake to make – no beating, no melting, no big pile of washing up! Just throw everything in one bowl, mix it up and then stick it in the oven! If you are a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of magi-cake strips (keep an eye out as the price for these seems to vary quite a lot – I’ve seen them for as little as £15, but they are definitely worth the money regardless!) – they work brilliantly for cakes like this that take a while to cook and may otherwise bake rather unevenly.  

The frosting is also very simple to make – there isn’t loads of it, so you do need to spread it fairly thinly over the top and around the sides: a tilted turntable and a good palette knife makes this much easier. Sprinkling the nuts around the edges of the cake is completely optional, but it does help to disguise any bits of the frosting that aren’t beautifully smooth! Again, the tilting turntable does make this much easier to do, but, be warned, no matter how hard you try, the nuts will go everywhere when you do this!

As there is cream and cream cheese in the frosting, you will either need to eat this cake immediately or store in the fridge. If you do store in the fridge, remove one hour before serving to allow it to return to room temperature.

Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and caramelised walnuts

Pre-decoration - the cake strips help to ensure a beautifully even bake

Ingredients

1. 225g self-raising flour
2. 1 tsp baking powder
3. 140g soft brown sugar
4. 50g mixed chopped toasted nuts
5. 50g raisins
6. 120g carrots (grated)
7. 2 ripe medium-sized bananas (mashed)
8. 2 eggs (beaten)
9. ¼ pint oil

For the frosting

1. 100ml double cream
2. 80g icing sugar
3. 85g full fat cream cheese (like Philadelphia)
4. ½ tsp vanilla extract

For the caramelised walnuts and mixed nut sprinkles

1. 30g butter
2. 30g light brown sugar
3. 60g walnuts
4. 100g mixed chopped toasted nuts

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Line a 20cm deep cake tin with baking parchment.
3. Stir together flour, baking powder and sugar in a large mixing bowl.
4. Add nuts, raisins, grated carrot and the mashed bananas and stir to mix.
5. Add beaten eggs and oil and stir until well mixed.
6. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 45 – 60 minutes, or until firm to the touch.  
7. Remove from tin and cool on a wire rack.
8. While the cake is cooling, melt the butter in a small frying pan.
9. Add in the sugar and the walnuts and stir for about 4 minutes until caramelised.
10. Tip out onto baking parchment and set aside to cool.   
11. Whip cream until softly stiff.
12. Cream icing sugar, vanilla and cream cheese together.
13. Fold in cream.
14. When the cake is completely cool, spread frosting over the top and around the sides of the cake.
15. Sprinkle the chopped mixed nuts around the edge of the cake and top with the caramelised walnuts.

Egg-free banana, oat and raisin muffins

Sunday afternoon and I’m waiting to watch the Queen’s Club tennis final but, unsurprisingly, the tennis is suspended due to rain.  Finding a hand of overripe bananas in the fruit bowl, I decided to make use of the time and whip up some banana muffins. I found this recipe on the web and decided to give it a go as it looked fairly simple and we had all of the ingredients in the cupboard.  I added a handful of raisins to the recipe for extra flavour and texture (would probably have used sultanas but we didn’t have any!).

This is a very easy and quick recipe. They are very banana-y and feel very healthy! I put in three bananas and I think that this was slightly too much as the balance of banana to cake wasn’t quite right and this meant that they were slightly sticky in the cases. The texture was generally good though – crisped on top but moist inside.

 
Egg-free banana, oat and raisin muffins

Ingredients

1. 25g/1oz unsalted butter
2. 3 tsp runny honey
3. 2-3 large, ripe bananas
4. 100g/3.5oz plain flour
5. 55g/2oz porridge oats
6. 1 heaped tsp baking powder
7. 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
8. 1/2 tsp cinnamon
9. Handful raisins or sultanas
10. 75ml/2.5fl oz milk            

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas mark 5.
2. Line a muffin tin with paper cases.
3. Melt the butter and honey in a saucepan.
4. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a bowl.
5. Mash the banana and mix with the honey and butter.
6. Add this mixture and the milk to the dry ingredients, stirring until mixed lightly.
7. Spoon into the muffin cases, sprinkling a few extra oats on top.
8. Bake for 25mins until golden brown and firm to touch.

Hummingbird Cupcakes (banana, pineapple and pecan)

 

So, seeing as it was my birthday, I figured I had better make cakes for the netball girls. Netball was on Saturday morning – I had Friday off but was planning to be out all day, so cakes had to be made on Thursday evening after work. This meant two things – I needed to make something that would last well for a couple of days and that wouldn’t take too much time and effort.  I already had some ginger cake made at the weekend but wanted to take a second option. I had a flick through my recipe file and found the recipe for Hummingbird Cupcakes.  This is another recipe from the Sara Stanley cupcake course that I did at the Bertinet Kitchen (see also my Red Velvet recipe) and I love this recipe. I hadn’t made these for ages and they’re fairly easy to make, don’t need a lot of fussy decoration and they last really well, so decision made!

Tins of crushed pineapple aren’t always that easy to find – so, if needed, just use a normal can of pineapple and whizz the pineapple up in a food processor or mini chopper.  I chucked the pineapple and banana in a food processor and quickly blitzed them up together, and this worked really well.

The original Sara Stanley Hummingbird recipe topped the cupcakes with a vanilla cream cheese frosting – this is delicious and complements the cake flavours beautifully. However, the problem with cream cheese frosting is that it should be kept in the fridge – which isn’t great for the cakes themselves. As I was planning to keep the cakes for a couple of days, I wanted to do something different. As I had the pineapple juice leftover from the tinned pineapple, I decided to have a go at making pineapple buttercream. I reduced the pineapple juice down to approx. 60ml by microwaving it for 30 seconds at a time until suitably reduced. I then added this to my normal buttercream recipe in place of milk. It tasted great and really worked well with these cakes.

You may find that you need to make extra caramelised pecans – they’re delicious!

Hummingbird Cupcakes

Ingredients

1. 1 large egg
2. 1 egg yolk
3. 230g caster sugar
4. 110g corn/grapeseed/sunflower oil
5. 1 tsp vanilla extract
6. 125g low fat yoghurt
7. 100g mashed banana (1 medium banana)
8. 100g drained tinned pineapple, crushed
9. 160gg plain flour
10. Pinch of salt
11. ¼ tsp cinnamon
12. ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
13. Pinch of baking powder
14. 60g chopped pecans

For the pineapple buttercream

1. Leftover pineapple juice from the tin of pineapple
2. 110g butter at room temperature
3. 500g icing sugar 

For the caramelised pecans

1. 30g butter
2. 30g light brown sugar
3. 60g pecans

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 165C. Place 12 large cupcake cases into a bun tin and about 8 mini cupcake cases into a mini bun tin.
2. Whisk egg, yolk and sugar until pale and fluffy.
3. Stream in oil and vanilla, whilst continuing to whisk.
4. Add yoghurt, banana and pineapple and mix.
5. Sieve the flour into a separate bowl, add all the remaining dry ingredients and stir together.
6. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir gently until combined.
7. Fill the large cupcakes to two-thirds full and then use the remaining mixture to two-thirds fill the mini cupcake cases.
8. Bake until the cakes are golden and spring back when lightly touched. The mini cupcakes will take 15-25 minutes to bake and the larger cupcakes 20-30 minutes.
9. When baked, remove from oven and allow to cool in the tin for 5 minutes. Remove from the tins and allow to cool fully on a wire cooling rack. 

For the buttercream

1. Pour the pineapple juice into a microwaveable bowl and microwave for 30 seconds at a time until reduced to 60ml. Allow to cool.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, reduced, cooled pineapple juice and half the icing sugar until smooth.
3. Gradually add the rest of the icing sugar and beat again until smooth and creamy.

For the caramelised pecans

1. Melt the butter in a small frying pan, over a low heat.
2. Add the sugar and pecans and stir for about 3 minutes until caramelised.

Banana Cake

I had a couple of over-ripe bananas hanging round in the kitchen so I decided to have a go at a banana bread/cake today. After a quick search on the internet, I found a couple of recommendations for this recipe. It looked nice and easy and I had all the necessary ingredients so I decided to give it a go. Mid-way through the bake, I realised that my loaf tin was too small, so I decided to just bung it in a round cake tin and hope for the best! It turned out just fine – cooking in about the same time as suggested for the loaf tin.

The original recipe does not include the fudge chunks – I had these in the cupboard and decided to throw them in rather than the walnuts – I figured it would give quite a nice banoffee flavour. The golden syrup also isn’t in the original recipe but was suggested in one of the comments below, and so I decided to give that a go too.

When the cake came out of the oven, it looked quite domed in the middle, but it settled down to a nice flat top. Some of the banana did sink a little to the bottom – I think I should have mashed it a little smaller - but overall, the flavour of this cake was fantastic and it was a nice moist cake.

Ingredients

1. 115g butter
2. 170g caster sugar
3. 225g self-raising flour
4. 2 eggs
5. 2 tblsp golden syrup
6. 115g chopped walnuts (optional)
7. 85g mini fudge chunks (optional)
8. 2 large/3 medium bananas

Method

1. Heat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin / 20cm deep round cake tin.
2. Mash the bananas in a bowl and set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
5. Mix in the bananas and the walnuts/fudge chunks if using.
6. Stir in the sifted flour.
7. Stir in the golden syrup.
8. Pour your mixture into the tin and pop it in the oven.
9. Bake the loaf for 40 minutes and then lower the oven temperature to 150C/300F/Gas 2 and bake for a further 30 minutes.
10. When cooked, the cake should spring back when touched lightly.
11. Once cooked, remove from oven and place the tin on a wire rack.
12. Leave to cool for 15 minutes and then remove from tin and place on wire rack to cool completely.