I don’t like to toot my own horn but this carrot cake helped me win an office bake off so toot toot! The recipe came from my mums friend and has been a go to for me. Please don’t laugh at the clearly amateur decorating skills as it was the best I could do – if you don’t want to attempt this you can easily just use the frosting on the top with not carrots or even cover the top with walnuts.

Ingredients for the cake

• ½ cups vegetable oil
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tbs cinnamon
• 1 tsp salt
• ¾ cup finely chopped walnuts
• 3 cups grated carrot

Frosting

• ½ cup butter at room temperature
• 227g cream cheese at room temperature
• 454g icing sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• ½ cup finely chopped walnuts
• ¼ cup desiccated coconut
• Orange and green food colouring (optional)

Method

1. Stir together oil and sugar until smooth, beating in the eggs one at a time. Then in a separate bowl sift together flour , baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Add dry ingredients to egg mixture, combine well. Stir in walnuts and carrots
2. Pour into pan bake for 1 hour at 175C or when a skewer inserted comes out clean. Remove from pan and cool completely
3. Cream together butter and cream cheese, gradually add icing sugar and vanilla. Once the cake has cooled completely cover in the frosting and then on the sides of the cake place the walnuts and coconut (these will stick to the frosting and cover up any bad icing skills you might have).
4. If you want to have carrots on the cake I took a small amount of the frosting and divided between two bowls adding green and orange food colouring. You don’t need a piping bag – any zip lock bag will do for this. Place the icing in two zip lock bags into a bottom corner, cut the edge off the corner and you’re ready to go! I did a few test runs on a plate of the carrots to check the holes in the piping bags were small enough (you don’t want one giant carrot!). There are lots of tutorials online to help with this!

Keep chilled , remove for a while before eating.