Easy The Best Ultimate Carrot Cake

Ultimate carrot cake.

You can have Ultimate carrot cake using 20 ingredients and 5 steps. Here is how you cook that.

Table of Contents Show

It’s 155 ml of sunflower oil, plus extra for greasing.
Prepare 230 g of self-raising flour.
You need 1 tsp of baking powder.
You need 1 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon.
It’s 1/2 tsp of mixed spice.
You need 1/2 tsp of ground ginger.
It’s 230 g of light brown muscovado sugar.
You need of Finely grated zest of 1 satsuma or mandarin, plus strips to decorate.
You need 100 g of walnuts chopped.
Prepare 300 g of carrots, coarsely grated.
It’s 3 of medium free-range eggs, beaten.
Prepare of for the icing:.
It’s 50 g of butter, softened.
It’s 200 g of full-fat cream cheese, we recommend Philadelphia.
It’s 100 g of icing sugar, plus extra to dust.
You need of Finely grated zest of 1 orange.
You need of For the orange peel glaze:.
It’s 2 of oranges.
It’s 200 ml of water.
Prepare 200 g of caster sugar.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan160°C/gas 4. Grease an 18cm loose-bottomed round cake tin and line the base with baking paper. Sift the flour, baking powder and spices into a large bowl. Add the sugar, zest, pecans and grated carrots, then stir until well combined. Stir in the beaten eggs and oil, then mix well..
Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake in the oven for 1 hour or until a skewer comes out clean. Transfer to a cooling rack, leave in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out and leave to cool completely before icing..
For the icing, beat the butter in a large bowl with a hand mixer until really soft. Add the cream cheese and beat again until well mixed. Sift over the icing sugar, add the orange zest, then beat until smooth. Store, covered, in the fridge until needed..
For the orange peel, carefully pare the zest from the orange (a tool like this would be helpful). Put the water and sugar in a saucepan and heat until the sugar has dissolved. Add the orange zest and remove from the heat. Let the zest sit in the sugar syrup until it has completely cooled..
Carefully cut the cake in half (watch our cheat’s how-to video here) then spread half the icing between the cake layers and the other half on top. Decorate with the orange zest strips..