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*Giddy* - and some carrot cake


Am extremely happy today. Have discovered Nigel Slater's Real Food on Youtube (under TV, Food and then it streams from 4 on Demand)

But, other little things I've been up to. Made a carrot cake today. The originating recipe was from James Martin's Desserts, however I made some fairly dramatic changes to it. None of the decoration, a different frosting, different flour, different flavouring, different sugar, no nuts etc etc.

My version therefore is as below:
Ingredients:
200g grated carrot (two big-uns..)
175g demerara sugar
2 large eggs
150ml sunflower/veg oil
200g self raising flour (I comboed baking powder and plain)
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp cinnamon
120g sultanas
50g dessicated coconut

Frosting:
300g cream cheese
2 huge tbsp icing sugar
1/2 lemon worth of juice
Muesli

Method:
1. Sugar, eggs and oil. Mix.
2. Add flour, cinnamon and bicarb. Mix.
3. Put in sultanas, coconut and carrot. Mix (Note, I did a quick soak of the sultanas in a squeeze of lemon and a bit of cordial but on tasting it didn't really show since I had nice organic sultanas anyway.)
4. Pour into a pan (mine was about 8 inches, lined with parchment on the base, greased at the sides, and had a loose bottom.)
5. Bake for approximately an hour at Gas Mark 5. (Start prodding with the skewer at 35minutes)
6. Tip the humped back mary out onto a plate and leave the flat side up to ice. (Don't have to, but it saved me a dilemma of how to get it back down...)
7. The frosting. I used a couple of large, heaped table spoons of icing sugar (to be technical it was fondant sugar but that's just because that's what we had), dissolved it in a decent squeeze of half a lemon (we had lemon in the house), mixed with a 300g pack of philadelphia cheese to taste.
8. Spread around and then top with a sprinkle of muesli. Mine happened to be the uber pricy but 50% fruity Dorset brand but it is pretty and was damn yummy. Ah cake.
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