Little Carrot Cakes and Courgette Loaf Cake

I've a glut of Courgettes at the moment, amazing considering that I only planted two courgette plants on the lottie this year. This morning I went looking about on the net for a fun recipes to get my kidlets cooking and also eating up their greens and found a lot of good recipes on www.allrecipes.co.uk.

As usual I realised that I didn't have all of the right ingredients to follow any of the recipes exactly and so I jiggled the quantities a little and as both the carrot cake and courgette loaf cake turned out pretty well I thought I'd pop them up on my blog (because I am a sucker for loosing those important little bits of paper with the ingredients list on them and we'll likely want to make these again!). First up, Ethan and I made a dozen little Carrot Cakes, they didn't even get properly cooled down from the oven before the kids tucked in!

Carrot Cakes

Dry Ingredients

• 150g Self Raising Flour
• 1 tsp baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp Nutmeg

Wet Ingredients

• 125g Unsalted Butter
• 125g Soft Brown Sugar
• 1 Medium Carrot (grated)
• 2 eggs

We mixed the flour and dry stuff together in one bowl and sieved it a couple of times. Next we put the butter, sugar, carrots and eggs together in another bowl and gave it all a good mix then added the flour and whisked it up with the electric mixer, plopped the batter in to cake cases and baked on 4 for about 20 mins. Whilst the carrot cakes were baking Ruby and I got started on the courgette loaf cake.

Courgette Loaf Cake

Wet ingredients

•  200g Courgette (grated)
• 150g Granulated Sugar (we didn't have any Castor Sugar)
• 1 egg
• 125ml Vegetable Oil

Dry ingredients

• 125g Plain Flour
• 75g Plain wholemeal flour
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Bicarb
• 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1tsp Mixed Spices
• 1/2 tsp Nutmeg
• 1tblsp Lemon Juice

As before we combined the dry ingredients, sieved and set them aside, then bunged all of the wet ingredients together in another bowl and whisked with and electric mixer before adding the dry mix and whisking again. This batter mix was much more liquid than the carrot cake batter, we popped it in a buttered/floured loaf time and cooked it out slowly on gas mark 3 for 1hr 20 mins. The recommended cooking time was just 45 mins but the cake was nowhere near ready at that point. Next time I think I will reduce the oil content a bit and cook the cake on 4 to see if that works better.

Cougette Loaf Cake with a sprinkling of icing sugar on top!

The tiddlers did try a little bit of the loaf cake which was all moist and crumbly and lovely but much preferred the carrot cakes, next time I think I'll take the skins off of the Courgettes before grating as they will be completely invisible!

Have a lovely weekend, Jolene xx