Carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream

It’s been a busy couple of months with lots of friends and family visiting! I made these carrot cupcakes about a month ago, when some friends were visiting on their way down from Leeds to Cornwall. I fancied making these as I haven’t made them for ages – they are a fairly quick and easy cake to make but they taste delicious.

The recipe comes from my “go to” Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery book. I’ve made them before and they work brilliantly well with the orange cream cheese icing in the book, however, they then need to be kept in the fridge. As my friends were travelling onwards, I wanted to give them some for their holiday and so I stuck with a simple orange buttercream and a sprinkle of cinnamon.

The recipe is simple and these are a very reliable bake. The mixture is a lot runnier than most cake mixtures, but don’t be alarmed by this. If you have time before you start baking, soak the raisins in a mixture of boiling water, orange juice and a bit of cinnamon and they will plump up beautifully.  The recipe calls for 130g raisins, but I usually chuck a few more in.

Carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream

Ingredients

1. 225g carrots, peeled and trimmed
2. 130g raisins
3. 2 large eggs
4. 130g caster sugar
5. 120ml corn oil
6. ½ tsp vanilla extract
7. Grated zest of 1 orange
8. 120g plain flour
9. 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
10. Pinch of salt
11. 1 tsp ground cinnamon

Orange buttercream

1. 115g butter, at room temperature
2. 500g icing sugar, sifted
3. 4 tblsp freshly squeezed orange juice

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 160C.
2. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake cases.
3. Finely grate the carrots and drain off any liquid.
4. Combine the grated carrot with the raisins in a large bowl and set to one side.
5. Using a stand mixer, beat the eggs and sugar together for several minutes.
6. Add the oil, vanilla and orange zest and beat well.
7. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt and cinnamon together in another bowl.
8. Gradually add these ingredients to the egg and sugar mixture, folding carefully after each addition.
9. Pour this mixture into the bowl containing the carrots and raisins and mix with a wooden spoon until evenly distributed.
10. Carefully spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases, filling them to about two-thirds full.
11. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes, until the cakes bounce back when touched.
12. Remove from the oven and leave the cakes in the tin for about ten minutes before placing on a wire rack to cool.
13. To make the buttercream, beat the butter, juice and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
14. Add the rest of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
15. Spoon the buttercream into a piping bag topped with a Wilton 1M piping nozzle.
16. Once the cakes have cooled, pipe a swirl of buttercream onto the cakes and top with a sprinkle of cinnamon. 

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.

Carrot, pistachio and coconut cake (gluten-free)

Flicking through this month’s Good Food magazine, this cake caught my eye. A few friends and colleagues are coeliac and so I’m always on the look-out for good gluten-free recipes: this one looked really unusual and tasty.

Having decided to make this, and made sure that I had all the ingredients, I realised that I don’t own the 24cm cake tin that the recipe demanded. I decided to go with it anyway and split the mixture between 2 20cm sandwich tins. The cakes were obviously smaller and a little thinner than the original, but generally completely fine.

This cake was lovely and easy to make – a quick blitz in the stand mixer to froth up the eggs and sugar and then gradually add in the rest of the ingredients. It did take much longer than the suggested hour to cook though – I think it took about an hour and a half in the end, but my oven always bakes slowly so I have suggested 1 hour 15 minutes.

The Good Food recipe suggested serving the cake with rose scented double cream. However, I was taking this into work and so wanted to pretty it up a bit! I decided to flavour my icing with orange blossom water as I felt that it would complement the other flavours, but you could also use rose water and then top with crystallised rose petals rather than the orange zest – which could look really pretty.

I loved this cake! It was really unusual and had a lovely flavour and moist texture. I love the flavour of coconut but I’m not usually sure about desiccated coconut as the texture can be a bit dry and claggy. However, the rest of this cake was so moist that this was not a problem. I’ll definitely be making this again!

Carrot, pistachio and coconut cake

Ingredients

1. 3 large eggs
2. 200g golden castor sugar
3. 2 tsp vanilla extract
4. 200g ground almonds
5. 100g desiccated coconut
6. 2 tsp ground cinnamon
7. 140g butter, melted
8. 2 large carrots, grated
9. 100g pistachios, roughly chopped or pulsed in a mini processor

To ice:

1. 1 - 2 tsp orange blossom water
2. 100g icing sugar
3. Zest of one orange
4. Chopped pistachios

Or serve with:

1. 300ml double cream
2. 2 tblsp icing sugar
3. A few drops of rose water

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 160C.
2. Line one 24cm cake tin, or 2 20cm cake tins.
3. Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract in a stand mixer until frothy.
4. Stir in the ground almonds, coconut and cinnamon.
5. Stir in the melted butter.
6. Add the grated carrots and pistachios and stir until all ingredients are evenly combined.
7. Pour the mixture into the tin/s and place in pre-heated oven.
8. Bake for approximately 1 hr 15 minutes (check after an hour), or until cake is firm and golden on top.
9. Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool in the tin for at least 4 hours.

To ice

1. When cool, mix the orange blossom water with the icing sugar.
2. Add extra water until the icing is smooth and pipeable.
3. Place the icing in a piping bag and drizzle over the cake.
4. Scatter over the chopped pistachios and the orange zest. 

Or to serve with scented cream:

1. Tip the cream, icing sugar and rose water into a mixing bowl.
2. Whisk to soft peaks.