Bear with me on this post as I forgot to take pics whilst making the cakes… still getting used to blogging my foodie adventures!!

Yesterday was one of my bff’s birthday and I wanted to make some cakes for her, as I am custom to do. Previously I always made Coffee & Walnut cakes for her, but felt I need to try something different. And with a sneaky little text I got my answer: Carrot Cake.

I must stress here that I used a BBC Good Food recipe that you can find here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/470640/carrot-and-cream-cheese-cupcakes

What I love about the BBC Good Food recipes is that they are well laid out, easy to follow and do not use strange ingredients that you would have to buy from specialist stores.

This recipes took me about 2 1/2 hours in total to make – sounds like a lot of time but this is including prepping the ingredients (such as grating the carrots and zest) cooling time and icing, all at a slow and relaxed pace.

I did tweak the recipe slightly, as it calls for half normal self-raising flour and half wholemeal self-raising flour – I don’t have wholemeal SR flour as a stand-by in my kitchen and tbf I don’t think you need it! So I used all normal SR flour.

As you may be able to see from the pictures the icing is mottled orange/cream colour, this is intentional as I tried to create a two-toned effect. Note: cream cheese is not the best icing to work with for this effect as it’s not a stiff enough icing, but it doesn’t look that bad.

Another change I made was too the topping, the BBC Good Food recipe calls for orange sprinkles, however I like a traditional carrot cake and I think walnuts need to be incorporated. As there were none in the cake itself, crushed and on the top they went – which I think looks quite good, a more rustic, boutique look, not like something off a production line.

In conclusion a good recipe which was well received, will definitely make these again.

So there you have it in a nice little cupcake box.