Spiced Carrot and Walnut Cake
A moist, heavily spiced carrot cake with toasted walnuts through the crumb, served with a cream cheese sauce poured rather than piped.
- Total
- 1 hr 10 min
- Prep
- 25 min
- Bake
- 45 min
- Serves
- 12
- Level
- Easy
- Tin
- 20 cm springform
Carrot cake is the one everybody claims not to like and then has a second slice of. It is also the most forgiving cake on this site: no creaming, no folding technique, nothing to split. Wet bowl into dry bowl, carrots in, bake.
The spice quantities look high. They are not: carrot and oil both mute spice, and a timid carrot cake is just a damp sponge.
The frosting is deliberately loosened into a sauce and poured. It suits the cake better than a thick cap of it, and there is no piping to get wrong.
Ingredients
For the cake
For the cream cheese sauce
You will need
- 20 cm springform tin
- Box grater
- Large mixing bowl
Method
Oven 175°C · fan 155°C · 345°F
Toast the walnuts
Toast the walnuts in a dry pan for 4 minutes until they smell nutty, then chop them roughly and cool. Raw walnuts taste faintly of cardboard in a cake; toasted ones taste of walnut.
Heat the oven and grate the carrots
Heat the oven to 175°C / 155°C fan. Butter a 20 cm springform tin and line the base. Grate the carrots on the coarse side of the box grater, because fine grating turns them to water.
Tip Do not squeeze the grated carrot. That moisture is what keeps the cake damp for four days.
Whisk the dry ingredients
Whisk the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, all the spices and the salt together in a large bowl.
Whisk the wet ingredients
In a second bowl, whisk the brown sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla for a minute until smooth and slightly thickened.
Combine, then fold in carrot and walnuts
Pour the wet into the dry and stir until just combined, then fold in the grated carrot and the walnuts. The batter is thick and stiff enough to hold the grater marks.
Bake for 45 minutes
Bake for 45–50 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. This cake looks done on top long before it is, so trust the skewer rather than the colour.
Release and cool completely
Cool 20 minutes in the tin, then unclip the ring. The cake must be completely cold before the sauce goes near it.
Make the pouring sauce
Beat the cream cheese with the icing sugar until smooth, then beat in the cream, vanilla and lemon juice until it is the consistency of thick double cream. Stop as soon as it pours, because over-beaten cream cheese turns runny and will not come back.
Top and serve
Scatter chopped walnuts over the cake, slice, and pour the cream cheese sauce over each portion.
Baker's notes
- Oil rather than butter is deliberate. It stays liquid in the fridge, which is why an oil cake is still moist cold and a butter cake is not.
- Raisins or sultanas, 80 g, folded in with the walnuts, are traditional. Leave them out if you are in the other camp.
Keeping it 4 days in a tin, or 5 in the fridge. The sauce keeps 4 days refrigerated; loosen it with a splash of cream before pouring.
Questions, answered
Can I make it as a two-layer cake with frosting?
Yes. Split the batter between two 20 cm tins, bake for 25–28 minutes, and stiffen the sauce by leaving out the cream entirely for a spreadable frosting.
My cream cheese sauce went runny. Can I fix it?
Chill it for 30 minutes and stir gently. If it is still loose it was over-beaten, and the only real fix is to beat in another 50 g of cold cream cheese by hand.
If it goes wrong
Three things account for most of what happens to a cake in a domestic oven. Each has its own guide.
- It sank in the middleSeven causes, told apart by the shape of the crater.
- It came out raw in the centreBrown outside, wet inside, and how to rescue the one you are holding.
- The caramel seizedIt is almost always fixable. The lump re-melts.
