Bake With Me: Carrot and Walnut (Mini) Cakes

Morning Beautifuls,

Baking recipes! Yay! This time I want to share with you a super delicious Carrot and Walnut cake – on in my case, mini cakes!

So without any rambling, lets get started!

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 large egg
• 56g caster sugar
• 50g carrot (or 1 medium carrot)
• 75g self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon powder
• 18g walnuts (or just a nice handful) + a few to decorate with!

First step is to whisk oil, egg and sugar together. Once this mixture is smooth and thicker, add carrot and mix through. Add flour, powder, cinnamon powder and chopped walnuts and stir until just mixed. Add this simple mixture into your selected baking pan. I decided to make three cute small loaf tins but you can use a normal cake tin or even cupcake cases to make super awesome cupcakes! Bake in the oven (duh!) for 25-35mins on 180 degrees Celsius  or until an inserted skewer comes out clean! For me, the skewer method is always best just in case the oven is having a nap or something!

While they cool down, I love making the icing. For this, I add butter and sugar into a bowl and mix, adding more sugar than butter until a frosting is made. I would love to give you exact amounts (but I have no idea what they are!). Usually its one to three tablespoons of butter with about 1 cup of icing sugar (but start with 1/2 a cup!). It really depends how buttery or sugary you like your icing!

Spread your awesome icing on top of the cakes and sprinkle some chopped walnuts/add a whole walnut.

Then enjoy!

Keep smiling,

Kay Anne

Bake With Me: Carrot Muffins

Morning Beautifuls!

I have a new recipe I wanted to share with you today, one of my favourite recipes of all time! It an carrot cake adapted from the Cakes & Slices Cookbook. Obviously, the ingredients can be made into either a cake or muffins, however I love the muffins as they are mouth-sized and taste so light and fluffy you could happily finish most of them before the time they cool down!

The ingredients for this recipe include:

• ¾ cup self-raising flour
• ½ cup plain flour
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp group cinnamon
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 ½ cup grated carrot (around 2 large carrots)
• ½ cup oil
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• ½ cup sour cream

For this batch of muffins, I actually omitted the cinnamon (Why? I’m not sure, I just wasn’t in the mood for it. However, it does add a little more flavour to the muffins when I add it!)

Firstly, sift the flours, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon in a large bowl. Usually when a recipe says ‘sift’, I don’t, however for this recipe I do go to the effort of sifting my flour – I find it does make them fluffier if you do. Add the brown sugar and carrots and stir. Then add the oil, eggs and sour cream into a different bowl (or measuring cup as you can see the oil is in). Add this to the flour mixture and stir until combined.

Spoon mixture into mini muffin pan. The pan I use literally makes mouth-sized muffins (around 32 mini muffins).

Cook them in the oven on 170°C for 10-15 mins (my took 13mins to be precise). Allow them to cool for about 3-5mins before removing them and placing them on a cooling (or into your mouth, nom nom).

You can now eat them as they are or spread a cream cheese frosting over them… I love them as they are – four may have magically disappeared while I was removing them from the patty cases…oops.

Feel free to give them a bake and enjoy the carroty goodness that they create!!

Keep smiling,

Kay Anne.