This is my first time making a cake for my friend’s birthday and I’ve decided to combine two of her favourite cakes into one. It took me slightly over an hour preparing the ingredients for the cake and my hands were sore from grating all that carrots. But the birthday girl loved the cake and everyone had a great time and that’s all that matters!

Ingredients for the cake
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees
Preparation time: 1 hour
Baking time: 30min or when the cake turns brown and the skewer comes out clean

1. 200g self-raising plain flour
2. 200g self-raising wholemeal flour
3. 200g unsalted butter
4. 160g brown sugar
5. 4 eggs
6. 2 tsp bicarbonate soda
7. 2 tsp cinnamon powder
8. 1 tsp nutmeg
9. 180ml buttermilk
10. 250g pitted dates
11. 175ml hot water
12. 300g grated carrots
13. zest 1 orange
14. 100g walnuts

Ingredients for the frosting

1. 300g cream cheese (I used Philadelphia light cream cheese)
2. 70g icing sugar
3. 1 tsp vanilla essence

Nutrition per slice (one cake serves 12)

Click on the images below for the baking instructions

Grate 300g of carrots and zest 1 orange

Whisk the brown sugar and butter together until light and fluffy

Cut the dates up into tiny pieces

Pour 175ml of boiling hot water into the dates and let it soak for 30 minutes

Once the dates have softened, use a fork to mash it up

Add the eggs in one at a time and continue to whisk

Add the buttermilk into the pitted dates

Sieve the flour, bicarbonate soda, cinnamon powder and nutmeg into the mixture

Add in the pitted dates mixture, grated carrots and walnuts and mix it well (this requires some arm muscle as it’s a big bowl of mixture)

Make sure that all the flour has been mixed into the ingredients

Spread the batter out into two cake tins and place it into the oven to bake

Once the cake is ready, take it out to cool

While the cake is cooling down, whisk the cream cheese together with the icing sugar until it is light, fluffy and glossy.

Spread the cream cheese over the cooled cake

And here you have it! The delicious home made pitted dates carrot cake!