Carroty goodness

To give these carrot cupcakes their full name, one ought to call this post 'Low fat low sugar carrot muffincakes'...but quite frankly that sounds silly. What these are is my attempt to be at least a little bit health conscious in my baking once in a while. And although obviously they aren't as good for you as, say, eating a carrot, they're a lot more fun; just a nice light carroty little cake (which i have taken an uncharactistcally few photos of so apologies!)

 

Adapted from ‘Muffins, fast and fantastic’ Susan Reimer, this is an even more low sugar offering, with lots of lovely warming spices. I used low fat cream cheese in the icing, which didn’t turn out very well to start with so I did have to add butter. It ended up more pourable than spreadable and I almost gave up on it, but it did firm up slightly in the end and actually tasted lovely with the cakes…lesson to self, don’t panic! I chopped up bits of dried apricot for the tops, but thats just me trying to make them a tad more aesthetically pleasing

Ingredients

10oz self raising flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 tsps ground cinnamon

1 tsp mixed spice

½ teaspoon ground ginger

1 egg

60-90 ml milk

3 tablespoons honey

2 ½ oz caster sugar

12oz carrot, finely grated

1 tsp vanilla syrup

90ml vegetable oil

2 oz sultanas

Cream cheese icing (optional if you want to be even more virtuous)

2oz low fat cream cheese

110g icing sugar, sifted

½ tsp vanilla syrup

30g unsalted butter

Preheat oven 180 fan over

Sift together flour, bicarb and spices. In a different bowl beat the egg and add the milk, honey, sugar, carrot and vanilla, and then the oil and stir v well (to get all the honey bits that will inevitably settle to the bottom) Pour the carrot mix into the flour mix and stir, adding the sultanas at the last folds. Bake for 20-25 minutes

Icing – stir cream cheese and icing sugar together as briefly as possible, then add butter if necessary and beat until smooth (again as briefly as possible, and omit the butter if you can and want a smooth icing rather than buttercream) add the vanilla last of all, and spread on the cakes once fully cooled