Carrot cake seems to have an uncanny ability to divide a room full of people within seconds. In the one corner you have its very vocal advocates who can’t stop praising the delectable combination of carrots, nuts and cream cheese, while in the other corner people are pulling very strange faces at the very notion of putting vegetables in dessert. I haven’t told them yet about zucchini-chocolate cupcakes, for I fear that it would lead to anxiety attacks. I just don’t have enough paper bags to deal with that.

Anyway, I’m very much in favour of carrot cake. Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it, that’s all I can say. And with the following very easy recipe, trying it shouldn’t pose too much of a problem!

You’ll need:

For the cake

175 gr. of carrot, grated

75 gr. almonds, coarsely ground

75 gr. walnuts, coarsely ground

175 gr. butter

250 gr. sugar

2 tablespoons of cinnamon

3 eggs

225 gr. self-raising flour

For the frosting

50 gr. butter (soft)

100 gr. cream cheese

125 gr. powdered sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar.

To prepare:

Preheat your oven to around 200 degrees C. Mix the ground walnuts, almonds, sugar and carrot together. Add eggs and butter and mix until it resembles a homogenous mass. Slowly add the self-raising flour and cinnamon, make sure to prevent lumps! Sieving the flour helps, but I’m usually too lazy for this and it seems to work out fine most of the time.

Pour the resulting mixture in a springform cake tin with a diameter of about 20 cm (a bit smaller or bigger won’t make much of a difference). Put the cake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. Turn down the oven to about 175 degrees after 30 minutes, and check every 5-10 minutes if the cake is done. It really depends on the kind of oven you use how long the cake has to bake: it has taken me everything from 35 to 60 minutes. You can tell if the cake is ready if a knitting needle or fork comes out clean when you poke it in the middle of the cake. If it is finished baking, take it out of the oven and let it cool.

Meanwhile, mix the butter and cream cheese together in a bowl, and add the powdered and vanilla sugar. Make sure the cake isn’t warm anymore when you spread the mixture on top, otherwise you get a fairly runny frosting.

Put the cake in the refrigerator until you are ready to serve.

It is also a great idea to decorate the carrot cake with tiny marzipan carrots and such, but a few walnuts also make it look very sophisticated if you aren’t patient enough for that kind of thing. As you can tell from the picture I don’t even have enough patience to put walnuts on top, but the cake was a smash hit anyway!

Just one more tip for serving: small pieces are usually quite enough for most people, this cake tends to be on the heavy side…