No 12 - Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake – it’s a coffee shop staple isn’t it?  I can remember carrot cake appearing on the radar in my early teens.  Carrots?!  In a cake?! That’s mad!  Looking back, what was in fact mad was that as soaked in butter as we were we’d had no experiences of cooking with oil (for anything).  The choice of oil wasn’t great and I suspect we used some really ropey ones.  I do recall those early carrot cakes being greasy;  moist, but oozing oil, - and greasy.

And cream cheese icing – what a revelation that was.  Carrot cake was possible an epiphany in my life, the point that sparked my interest in a world of food and cooking.

I think this particular carrot cake recipe came form one of those websites that advocates and provides suggestions for using up left-overs.  The idea is admirable and I subscribe to it whole-heartedly but am I alone in finding the suggestions regularly verge on daft?  Who has left-over cooked carrots?  We all know how much the family will eat, especially of such standard everyday vegetables as carrots.

Having said that it is easy to cook extra with a carrot cake in mind (but that isn’t using up left-overs is it?).  What is genuinely crazy is the notion that there’s a stray pineapple just lurking around because no one knows what to do with it.  Eat it.  Eat the thing.  Pineapple isn’t that common that we’d kick one aside in favour of a plate of kale, or a cheese sandwich.

My paternal grandfather was a grocer during WWII.  My father and his two brothers were young lads.  One of the advantages of living at the grocer’s shop was that you stood a better chance than most of getting your hands on something exotic and/or rationed from time to time.  For the boys, when asked what they wanted for a birthday the answer was simple – a pineapple.  They knew they’d have to share it with absolutely everyone if said pineapple could be sourced, and it meant forgoing any other gift, but that was it, the pinnacle of having it all; a single pineapple.

On top of that there are absolutely no criteria by which this cake might be regarded as a frugal on ingredients.  It is however a really great cake so gather up your left-over cooked carrots and that spare pineapple which just happens to have over-lingered in your fruit bowl and make this cake.

Carrot Cake

225g self-raising flour

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp baking soda

4 eggs

225g soft brown sugar

½ tsp vanilla essence

100g cooked mashed carrot

75g over-ripe pineapple (puréed)

75g chopped walnuts

75g desiccated coconut

125ml sunflower oil

Beat eggs and sugar together until fluffy, add oil, carrots, pineapple, essences, walnuts and coconut. Pour the wet ingredients into the sifted dry ingredients and mix.  Pour into greased, lined 8” spring-form tin.  Bake 45 -50 minutes in moderate oven (170C to 180C)

Cool in the tin and ice with

75g cream cheese

175g icing sugar

Vanilla or lemon essence.

That photo in the “Mr B’s cake decorating class” (below) is a double recipe made in a big gugelhuf mould; the hole is stuffed full of chocolate brazil nuts and the décor is exactly what it appears to be.  He made it for his daughter – and it definitely wouldn’t pass the motorbike ride test.