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 :)

Chocolate Diet Coke Cake

I have a friend who's obsessed (aka addicted) to Diet Coke. I can't remember the last time I saw her without a bottle and so I thought it would be perfect to make her a Diet Coke themed (it's not actually Diet Coke flavoured, I looked into that and it all seemed a bit bleurghh) birthday cake. Although locating a cake tin that wasn't round in my overflowing baking cupboard was slightly harder than expected, I thought the cake turned out rather well :)

Insanity is just another word for interesting...

We totally believe that being insane is great. If we only did sane things, we’d have nothing of any interest to tell our grandchildren, and so it’s for this reason (and maybe a tiny bit to do with the fact that Lady Gaga exists) that we think that surrounding ourselves with insanity is definitely the way to go. We’ve got so good at this whole insanity thing that we’re beginning to forget what sanity actually is…(I’ve just raised a perplexing philosophical dilemma when I’m meant to be talking about cake. That right there is the power of baking.)

So when my Most Insane Friend celebrated the fact that she had managed to reach the age of 18 without any major mishaps (chipping her tooth on a toilet, nearly getting run over on the M25 to save the battered pair of Converse she’d left on the roof of her dads car and falling in love twice merely counting as minor incidents) by throwing a party with a ‘My Favourite Thing’ theme, I for one was one hundred percent behind the idea.

Her list of favourite things was diverse and extensive and, some complained, slightly difficult to pull off in fancy dress, but, the Australian Accent, the platypus, the semi-colon and puns (yes, I genuinely quote) being some of her favourite things is probably why I love her. She did concede that maybe her theme was slightly ego-centric, but, really, who cares? All the best people are. (Oscar Wilde wouldn’t have been half as great if he hadn’t thought he was the literal bees’ knees).

So, once I had examined the list and decided that I would be attending as a seventies protester (burnt bra and all) I turned my attention to The Cake. I show my love for people by baking; we one hundred percent believe that homemade cake is literally love on a plate. I therefore wanted to show my Most Insane Friend that I love her… I needed a cake which put her insanity, and my love for aforementioned insanity, into cake form. I went through various options before settling on a four layer rainbow cake. It seemed appropriate.

Union Jack Vanilla Sponge

It was my friend Zoe's birthday, and she has a crazy obsession with union jacks so I thought I'd make her a heart shaped union jack cake: