There are so many different carrot cake recipes out there and I have tried a lot!  For me, some have too many nuts or none at all, some are really oily or too dry, not enough spice and flavour and just not quite right for me.  My cousin wanted carrot cake at part of her birthday cake so the challenge was set to make the best carrot cake to suit us!  Carrot cake is really easy to make and I like to think of it as one of my 5-aday. If only cake could be!!

You will need:

• 200ml Sunflower oil
• 200g Soft brown sugar
• 250g Self raising flour
• 4 Eggs
• ½ tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp Cinnamon
• 1tsp Mixed spice
• 75g Walnuts
• 300g Grated carrots
• 75g Raisins
• Grated zest of ½ an orange

Icing:

• 50g Butter
• 200g Icing sugar
• 60g Cream cheese
• 1tsp Lemon juice
• 1tsp Vanilla essence

Method:

• Grease and line 2 18cm loose bottom tins and preheat the oven to 160degrees
• Whisk the oil and sugar together.
• Add the eggs one at a time whisk until light and fluffy
• Sift in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices and fold gently
• Then fold in the walnuts, carrot, raisins and orange zest.
• Cook for about 40mins – 1 hour (checking after 40mins).
• Allow to cool in the tins for 5mins and turn out on to a cooling rack until completely cold.
• To make the icing simply put all the ingredients into your mixing bowl and beat until blended.
• Sandwich the two cakes together with half of the icing and spread the other half on the top of the cake and you are ready to serve!

You can also make this in a square tin and just ice the top, cutting the cake into smaller squares to serve.