Dark Chocolate Carrot Cake

This is just a quick entry - for Julie-Anne, a fellow baking mom : )
 Go visit her on Facebook at thecupcakemomza.


This dark chocolate carrot cake is just sublime!
It is a deliciously moist chocolate cake, with subtle undertones of orange. You are hardly aware of the presence of the carrots - if only in your conscience, where they re-assure you that what you're eating must be good for you... surely ; )

The original recipe is from the book From My Oven, by Fay Lewis (Struik): great recipes and lovely photographs!

Ingredients:
185g butter, at room temp
10ml grated orange rind
160g caster sugar
2 jumbo eggs
15ml golden syrup
375ml finely grated carrots (I use the food processor)
200g self-raising flour
2.5ml bicarb
75ml cocoa powder
200ml milk

Method:
Preheat oven to 175'C
Grease a 21x11cm Bundt tin. (I usually use a rose shaped silicone cake mould....but it can be tricky with such a moist cake...)

In a mixer, cream together the butter caster sugar and orange rind.
Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and then the syrup.

Add the carrots and milk; then sift in the flour, cocoa and bicarb. Mix gently until combined.

Spoon into the prepared tin.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Remove from the oven, and leave to cool before turning out from the tin.

The original recipe calls for  Cream Cheese icing, but really all this cake needs is a drizzle of something....cream ... melted chocolate... white chocolate.
...Or a great big dollop of Vanilla ice-cream.
In fact, it is actually a perfect "desert" cake - it would also be delicious hot from the oven, with any of the above toppings.

...drizzled with white chocolate...

Enjoy!


xxM