The Venerable Carrot

Vegetables. I have a hard time trying to get excited about most things let alone vegetables. I think most people are the same. I never ate them when I was a kid and apart from a brief love affair I had with broccoli once, I don't head straight for the salad if I have a choice. I spent many years, with some degree of success, craftily hiding and incorporating vegetables into my children's diets so that they would actually like them. I won that battle hands down.

Which brings me to the carrot. Not a bad veg really but hard come up with anything exciting to say about it or to do with it. Until I came across the following recipe in the BBC Good Food Magazine. It is well worth falling in love with carrots for this one and I promise you that this will be a recipe you make over and over as there will never be any left.

Ingredients

175g light muscovado sugar
175ml sunflower oil
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
140g grated carrots (about 3 medium)
100g raisins
grated zest of 1 large orange
175g self-raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp grated nutmeg

FOR THE FROSTING
175g icing sugar
1½-2 tbsp orange juice

• Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4/fan 160C. Oil and line the base and sides of an 18cm square cake tin with baking parchment.
• Tip the sugar into a large mixing bowl, pour in the oil and add the eggs. Lightly mix with a wooden spoon. Stir in the grated carrots, raisins and orange rind.
• Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices, then sift into the bowl. Lightly mix all the ingredients until evenly blended. The mixture will be fairly soft and almost runny.
• Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 40- 45 minutes, until it feels firm and springy when you press it in the centre. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn it out, peel off the paper and cool on a wire rack. (You can freeze the cake at this point.)
• Beat together the frosting ingredients in a small bowl until smooth - you want the icing about a bit runny. Set the cake on a serving plate and drizzle the icing back and forth in diagonal lines over the top, letting it drip down the sides.

I'm tempted to try a cream cheese frosting for this. Just mix cream cheese with icing sugar and spread on cake.