carrot cake recipe | Sadie's Bubble of Yum

This week, we had a ray of light, among all the alarming news, celebrating a special colleague and friend’s baby-shower. She requested a carrot cake and this finally forced me to attempt making one! I’m not a fan of nuts, especially pecan nuts, so this was really made with so much selfless love 🙂

Happy to report that this is lovely moist cake, easy enough to whip up, no fancy equipment needed and you can make it in advance, can I get a whoop-whoop!

Ingredients:

260g chopped toasted pecans (keep half for decorating)
300g brown sugar (I used the Natura Sugars Light Demerera sugar)
100g caster sugar
240ml oil
4 eggs
3/4 cup crushed pineapple (drain most of the sauce)
1 tsp vanilla extract or essence
312g flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp’s ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
2 cups carrots, grated

Method:

Preheat the oven to 177°C. Prepare either two or three round cake pans, by greasing them then lining with baking paper, finally greasing the baking paper too.
In a large bowl, whisk the sugars, oil, eggs, crushed pineapple and vanilla together in a large bowl until combined. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg together. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold together until just combined. Finally fold in the carrots and half of the pecans.
Pour the batter into the cake pans evenly and if utilising three cake pans then bake for 20-24 minutes and if using two pans, bake for 30-35 minutes. Test the cake by inserting a skewer, if it does not come out clean, continue to bake until it does and be sure not to over bake the cake. Do not over-bake. Allow cakes to cool completely in the pans before transferring to a cooling rack.
Assemble the cake by layering with cream cheese frosting. You can find my legit, no short cut cream cheese frosting recipe here 🙂 Top the cake with the leftover toasted pecans. To keep the cake nice and firm, pop it into the fridge for about 30mins before cutting and serving. Enjoy 🙂