Possibly the best carrot cake ever

So about 2 years ago, I had to make a healthy cake for food tech (yes I did food tech gcse and yes it's a real gcse don't be rude) and I just googled carrot cake and found this recipe -I justify my eating extraordinary amounts of it by telling myself it's healthy, it's not THAT healthy but sshh - I changed it slightly to fix my brief and then made it in my lesson. Unfortunately I doubled the mixture and then put it all in one deep cake tin, meaning it didn't cook for like an hour and a half which isn't good when your lessons are fifty five mins...
But anyway when it eventually cooked and iced it turned out to be absolutley delicious and somehow became slightly famous and I ended up baking it all the time and even got paid once which was quite exciting.And then I got more and more work and had less money (walnuts are expensive when your mother refuses to pay for ingredients for your 'bloody baking') so I stopped making it as much but it was my friends birthday and she is a big fan so I thought I'd make her cupcake versions, I used the same recipe but just cooked it for a shorter amount of time and if I may say so they turned out rather well :)

Ingredients:

 150g plain flour 

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda 

1 tsp baking powder 

1 tsp cinnamon 

150g caster sugar 

250g coarsely grated carrots (peel and chop off ends and do this in an electric food processor, I hand grated the first time I made this cake and that's an hour and a half of my life I'll never get back)

100g shelled walnuts, chopped 

150ml corn oil 

2 eggs, beaten 

1 tsp vanilla essence 

100g unsalted butter, softened

150g full-fat cream cheese

3/4 tsp vanilla essence

200g icing sugar

(this can be halved but I'm of the view that you can never have too much icing)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/gas mark 4.

2. Sieve flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and cinnamon into a bowl. Stir in the caster sugar, carrots and walnuts.

3. Pour in corn oil, mix a little bit then add beaten eggs and vanilla essence. Mix a little bit more and then beat for a minute (I recommend doing this by hand, it's not that bad, otherwise all the bits of carrot get stuck in your electric whisk). It really won't look attractive but I promise it looks a lot better when cooked!

4. Fill cupcake cases until they're a half to three quarters full then bake for about 20 mins, check they're cooked by inserting a skewer through the middle, it should come out clean. You can also press the top of one, it should spring back.

5. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

6. For the icing (the best bit), beat the butter until smooth and then add the cream cheese and vanilla essence. Mix until combined and then slowly sieve in the icing sugar. If it's too runny to spread leave in the fridge for a bit.

7. I then dyed a bit of the icing pink to pipe writing on my cupcakes and added sprinkles but you can decorate them however you like, just remember that it's cream cheese icing so will always be quite runny and won't work like buttercream icing.

The first sprinkles I used on the H turned out to be disgusting,
hence it being the odd one out

I then had left over pink icing, so I iced the slightly misshapen heart shaped cake and then put the icing between countless ginger biscuits (Ikea's own of course, the best ginger biscuits ever) which was delicious and a good use of left over cream cheese icing because it doesn't keep for long.

- Ellie x