Ingredients
- 300g soft brown sugar - I think I used a mixture of light muscovado and golden granulated.
- 250ml sunflower oil - I used corn oil because that's what I use in muffin recipes so it's always in the cupboard
- 3 large eggs
- 150g self raising flour
- 2 tsp mixed spice
- pinch of salt
- 250g carrots coarsely grated
- 150g pecans chopped (I put them in a bag and bashed them with a rolling pin)
- zest of half an orange - I use a zester and then chop the zest because I think you get more zest this way than if you use a grater
- juice of half a large orange
- 20g caster sugar (if I had done this I would have used granulated)
- 400g cream cheese - recipe says full fat and that's what I used because if you've having cake I don't see the point in low calorie stuff but I guess you could use low fat version
- 100g icing sugar - you can reduce this quantity if you want slightly less sweet frosting and I did use less
- zest and juice of half an orange
- pecan halves to decorate if you can be bothered - I couldn't
- Grease a rectangular tin 20cm x 25cm or thereabouts. Line with baking parchment and grease the baking parchment. This is always a faff but better to do this than have a cake that cannot be removed from the tin.
- Depending on how long your oven takes to heat up, and how long you take to mix things, preheat oven to 180˚C for a non fan oven or 160˚C for a fan oven. If you have a gas oven it's gas mark 4 or for an Aga you're on your own.
- Mix the sugar and the oil. I used a mixer and wasn't quite sure what this should look like. I stopped when it looked like it had combined.
- Add the eggs and mix until smooth. I mixed this for quite a while but it wasn't ever really smooth, more smooth-ish.
- Fold in flour, mixed spice and salt.
- Add grated carrot, pecans and orange zest and mix until combined. The point here is not to mix the living daylights out of it, so use a spoon and be gentle.
- Spoon into baking tin and cook for about 40 minutes. Check it with the skewer test. Jo uses a wooden skewer but I use a metal skewer. I don't know which is best or even whether it matters.
- If you are going to do the orange syrup (which I didn't) then while the cake is in the oven, heat the orange juice and sugar in a small saucepan until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid has reduced by one third.
- Brush the warm cake with the orange syrup and then leave the cake to cool.
- While the cake is cooling you can make the frosting by beating cream cheese, orange juice, icing sugar and orange zest together. Beat this for quite a while until smooth. I think I might have beaten it for too long as the mixture was sliding around the metal bowl without leaving a trail on the bowl. It was also struggling not to slide off the top of the cake. The orange syrup, being sticky, might help with this.
- Spread the frosting over the cooled cake and decorate with pecans if you want to.
- I cut this into 12 slices but I was told the slices were quite big (I thought they were just fine).
