Carrot Cake with Curd Cheese Frosting
·Dry ingredients
Mix together the flour, baking powder, spices and a pinch of salt.
Wet ingredients
Whisk the oil, sugar and eggs until light and creamy.
Grate the carrots and chop the nuts
Peel the carrots, trim the ends and grate them finely. Roughly chop the nuts (walnuts or pecans).
Combine everything
Add the carrots, nuts, orange juice and zest, and the coconut, along with the dry ingredients, into the whisked egg and oil mixture.
Bake
Pour the thoroughly combined batter into a cake tin about 24–26 cm in diameter. Don't forget to grease the tin with oil and dust it with flour. Bake at 180 °C for about 30–40 minutes. You can check with a skewer to test if it's done.
Let it cool
Once baked, let the cake cool completely. Meanwhile, prepare the frosting and the nuts for decorating the cake.
Toast the nuts
Put the nuts on a baking tray and into the oven at 150–160 °C. It's ideal to simply let the oven cool down slightly after baking the cake layer before doing this. Toast the nuts for about 20 minutes. Then take them out straight away and tip them into a tea towel, rubbing them inside it until the skins come off nicely.
Chop the nuts
Chop the peeled nuts to a medium-fine texture. I used a container with chopping blades, which gave the nuts an ideal texture — partly coarse and partly fine.
Whip the curd cheese frosting
Whip the curd cheese with agave syrup, adding as much as you like to taste, along with a touch of vanilla.
Slice the cake and fill with frosting
Using a sharp knife or a cake leveller wire, slice the cake layer lengthways into three parts. Spread the frosting between each layer and use it to cover the top and sides of the whole cake as well.
Coat with nuts and fruit
Press the chopped nuts onto the sides of the frosted cake and lightly over the top as well. Use the same pastry spatula you used for spreading the frosting to press the nuts onto the sides — it works brilliantly. And how do you finish decorating the cake? With fresh fruit, of course.
