Carrot Cake And Victoria Sponge

I promised some more blogs with actual recipes involved, and having baked two cakes recently I can now complete that particular objective.

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One of my colleagues is switching departments and so I baked a couple of cakes for his sort of 'last day do'.

I went for a Victoria sponge and a carrot cake.

Starting with the carrot cake, you will need:

- 120g self raising flour
- 120g wholemeal flour
- 350g carrots
- 60g pecans
- 2tsp ground cinammon
- 1tsp ground ginger
- 1tsp nutmeg
- 1tsp bicarbonate soda
- 250ml vegetable oil
- 170g muscovado sugar
- 4 eggs
- 2tbsp golden syrup

This is one of the most ingredient heavy cakes I've made, but it's not complicated at all.

Take a large mixing bowl and put the flour, sugar, spices, and bicarb into it. Grate in the carrots and chop the pecans and add those in too. Give the lot a good mix.

In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, oil and syrup.

You then want to fold this in to the dry mixture in the other bowl.

Pour this into a ten inch springform tin and bake for about an hour at 160°C.

Once the cake has cooled, you could ice it too. I used a tub of cream cheese (about 200g), about 50g butter and about 75g icing sugar. Just beat it all together and spread it on the top. I ran a fork over the icing in stripes to give it a slightly more rustic look.

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The Victoria sponge is altogether more simple to make. 

You will need:

- 400g self raising flour

- 8 eggs

- 2tsp vanilla essence

- 400g caster sugar

- 400g butter

- 150ml double cream

- Jam (I went for cherry)

Effectively you're baking two cakes here - one to use as a base and the other to top.

Cream together the butter and sugar before beating in the eggs and vanilla essence. Fold in the flour and split the mixture between two nine inch sandwich tins. 

Bake these for about half an hour at 180°C before removing from the oven. Allow them to cool completely and then take them out of the sandwich tins. 

Set aside the cake that looks best - use that for the top. With the other cake, slice it level and then spread it with a generous helping of jam.

Whip the double cream until it's very thick and spread this over the jam. Now place your second cake on top and dust the whole thing down with a little icing sugar. Perfect.

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Coming up:

- I have a wee bit of a review to do of the chocolate festival from today (Saturday 2nd April) and of course have a look at some of the chocolate I bought. 

- I have a couple of little recipes and smaller dishes that I've made recently and can now fill out a reasonable blog of their own.