Melt in your mouth carrot cake

I've always maintained that I'm not a cook - I have a couple of food recipes my family will stomach, that's it. My family is the harshest critique, especially Kenneth. You practically can't make anything he'll like unless it tastes like his mum's cooking. (All these pampered mummy's boys!!) My kids too, have extremely critical and discerning taste buds (at 2 years old, Lesley-Anne was dictating her daily lunch menu). You know how those kids cookbooks kids teach you how to make food shapes because if it looks good, the kid will love it? Never worked on mine.

However, I do like to bake and I have 3 tried and tested cake recipes that my family loves. One of them is my carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. When I make this, it's normally polished off within 3 days.

I made this again on Thursday. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

250ml oil or melted butter
200g brown sugar
3 eggs
250g sifted self-raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp cinnamon
dash of salt
2 large carrots, grated
100g chopped walnuts

Cream Cheese Icing

150g cream cheese (I use Philadephia Cream Cheese Light. If you want a richer cheese flavour, use the Regular.)
200g icing sugar
1 tsp lemon juice (optional: Kenneth doesn't like tangy icing so I skip this)

Cake:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius
2. Beat oil, sugar and eggs until well combined
3. Add flour, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and salt
4. Fold in carrots and walnuts (important: fold, NOT beat)
5. Pour into a 20cm square greased cake dish
6. Bake for about 30mins or until skewer comes out clean
7. Allow to stand 5 minutes before turning out
8. Cool completely before icing

Icing:

1. Beat cream cheese until smooth
2. Add icing sugar and lemon juice, beat until smooth

Instead of using a cake dish, you can also use a muffin pan like I did. I like making them as muffins instead of a whole cake because it bakes more evenly, and it's much more convenient for serving and storing. If you use a 12-muffin pan like I did, bake each batch for about 20 mins. You'll also need more icing if you're baking muffins.

The times are just estimates depending on your oven. I would recommend you check about 5 mins before the time is up because over baking totally spoils the taste. If you stop baking just when the skewer is almost clean, the residual heat should nicely finish up the cooking and you'll have a very moist cake.

After I coat the muffin with the icing, it looks like this:

Doesn't look like much, I know, I'm not great at dressing up my cakes. But it passes the taste test with flying colours. This cake is very, very moist, light and bursting with flavour. Plus it's filled with carrots and walnuts, all healthy stuff (just don't think of the oil)! Here's what the inside looks like:

After Kenneth finished helping me take the photo, he asked, "Can I eat my cake NOW?" And he proceeded to have a second helping. If my fuss pot likes it, I know it's good.