Carrot Muffins

I started using my juicer again yesterday. I love fresh juice first thing in the morning and the juicer, a Jack La Lanns's Power Juicer is amazing. It was expensive as juicers go but you can use whole fruits and vegetables without peeling or chopping.

The only down side is that it's a bit of a pain to clean and you're left with lots of pulp. If you've spent a premium on organic carrots, you don't want to throw most of them away....and can only add so much to soups and sauces. So after this mornings batch of all time favourite apple and carrot juice (which is much lusher than it sounds) I decided to root out a carrot cake recipe. I've collected quite a few but think this one is quick and easy to make as it uses oil instead of butter.

Here's the recipe......

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 250g of caster sugar I use golden..you could substitute with muscovado sugar or honey
• 185ml of sunflower oil
• 300g of SR flour
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt
• 2 teaspoons of baking powder
• 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
• 400g of peeled and grated carrots
• 55g of chopped walnuts

Method:

1. . Heat the oven to 180degrees centigrade (gas mark 4, 350f)
2. . Grease and line a nine inch cake tin, bun or muffin tins.
3. . Beat together the eggs and sugar
4. . Combine all the dry ingredients together and sift into the eggs and sugar mixture.
5. . Add the nuts and carrots and give the mixture a really good mix to combine all the ingredients.
6. . Pour the mixture into the containters and bake in the oven.

The original recipe is for a nine inch cake which needs baking for about an hour. Check that it's cooked properly by pushing a scewer into the middle of the cake, if it comes out clean the cake is ready. I made thirty small buns instead and baked them for about twentyfive to thirty minutes testing them in the same way. Once baked put on a wire wrack to cool.

Carrot cake usually comes with a creamy frosting, which I'm not keen on, so just dust them with icing sugar. I think it dates back to the time when I made a chocolate log covered with butter cream in a domestic science lesson at school. I ate almost all the log and made myself really ill.....ever since then I've had a real aversion to butter cream. But the addition of cream cheese to frosting really takes the edge of it making it much more tasty.

Cream cheese frosting:

The Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten makes a frosting using 8oz of butter and 12oz of cream cheese with vanilla extract to flavour with as much icing sugar added to make it as sweet as you like an also to make it the texture you like.

I think this carrot cake recipe would have been lovely with raisins added. Also either ground or a little grated fresh ginger is lovely to add an extra zing.

They are great to grab for a quick breakfast yummy and chewy and the sugar makes a lovely crunchy topping........mmmmm