Easy Carrot and Apple Cake

Carrot cake and other fruit and vegetables cakes were my childhood favourites, especially if they had a good icing such as cream cheese with icing sugar. You an experiment with the fruit and vegetable mixtures you use in cakes as you become confident. Apple, banana and courgette work well on their own or with other fruit and vegetables.

If you just want to make a simple carrot cake replace the courgette (also known as zucchini) with carrot. Banana, apple and pineapple also make good additions to this recipe.

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8-12 portions
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Prep: 10 minutes
Cook: 60 minutes

Ingredients

  • 300g self raising flour
  • 200g soft brown sugar
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 2 tsp grated nutmeg
  • 300ml olive oil or sunflower oil
  • 4 eggs, medium
  • 300g carrot, peeled, trimmed and grated
  • 100g apple, trimmed and grated
  • 2-3 tbsp sultanas
  • 80g walnuts, chopped roughly (optional)
  • 200g cream cheese
  • 100g unsalted butter (softened)
  • 300g icing sugar
  • zest of 1 lemon
  • 3 tbps walnuts, finely chopped (optional)

Method

  1. Carrot and Apple Cake: Preheat an oven to 180°C and butter a 20cm cake tin. Place the flour, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg in a food processor and blend briefly. Add the eggs and olive oil and process again until you gave a smooth mixture. Stir in the remaining ingredient until well combined. Pour the mixture into the cake tin and place it in the preheated oven. Allow it to cook for 50-60 minutes, to check that it is ready place a thin knife a skewer into the centre of the cake and it should come out clean. Remove the cake form the oven and allow ti to cool for 10-15 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.
  2. Icing: Place the cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon juice in a food processor or bowl and blend or whisk until you have a smooth creamy topping. If it is to runny add a little more cream cheese or icing sugar. Place the icing in the refrigerator for 10 minutes.
  3. To Serve: Place the cake on a plate (you may wish to slice the cake in half so that you have a layer of icing in the centre) and spread the icing over the top of the cake and sprinkle the icing with walnuts (optional).Alternatively you can simply sprinkle icing sugar over the cake.