Carrot cake and childhood memory

We all are holding childhood memories, memories about something our grandma used to cook, or our mom to bake or even our aunt or uncle. We do remember these special dishes and with this the special days, times and people.

One of my special childhood memory is about a carrot cake our mom used to bake. The funny thing about it is that I do not remember the taste very much or how the cake looked like, I only remember the happy feeling connecting to this cake. My mom stopped baking this cake when we grow up a little and somehow the whole carrot cake "excitement" was forgotten. One day however, when I was a grown up myself and crazy about the baking, I wanted to do a carrot cake I used to love when I was little. Naturally I asked my mom for the recipe, unfortunately she did not had it any longer. And so I started to look around for carrot cake recipes in Internet and found millions of them!!! I do not recall how many different recipes I tried and none of them would come close to "my carrot cake". The cake I seemed to remember was very simple, but most of the recipes would call for nuts, cocos, special spices or any other fancy ingredients...so by the end of the day I created a recipe myself. Well if you can call it created, I mainly left out all the fancy ingredients and kept the cake very simple.

Today I am sharing this recipe, mainly because a friend of my asked me to do so, as he would like to make it this weekend, but also because many other of my friends have been asking me for the recipe for so long now. And of course, Easter is around the corner and in my opinion this cake is a must for the Easter holidays....

Carrot cake
for 15 cm cake form, if you are using a bigger form, just double the ingredients

• 3-4 carrots grated
• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar (I prefer to use brown sugar)
• 60 ml vegetable oil
• 0,5 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1,5 teaspoon baking powder
• 150 g flour

Preheat the oven to 180C. In a bowl beat the eggs with the sugar, till fluffy and double in size. Add cinnamon and vegetable oil, mix quickly. Sift flour and baking powder to the egg-sugar mixture and mix together. Finally add the grated carrots and combine everything with a spatula. Grease and line your baking dish with baking paper, pour in the batter and bake for 40-50 minutes, till golden brown (make the stick test). Let the cake cool completely, before you frost it.

Cream cheese frosting

• 60 g butter softened
• 90 g powdered sugar
• 200 g cream cheese
• zest of 1 lemon

Beat the butter with the powdered sugar till fluffy and light in colour. Add the zest of a lemon and cream cheese (in 2 parts) and beat together till all well combined. Frost and decorate the cake. I did my carrots decoration out of a fondant, this can be also done with marzipan if you prefer.

The cake is very simple, not only in ingredients but also in preparation. All of my friends love it and would mention this cake, when they are speaking about me and the baking..somehow it seems to be my signature cake. I personally love making this cake, as it is easy and very delicious....

Enjoy!

P.S. Darling this post is for you. Let me know how it turned out!