Christmas Pudding Carrot Cakes

These were a happy accident.  I was planning to make some carrot cupcakes for Christmas and potentially as a second entry for the Christmas Carrot Blogger Competition on http://www.lovethegarden.com/.  And I decided I’d ‘Christmas’  up the recipe I found by using rather more dried fruit, soaking the fruit in rum first and then by using my own mix of Christmas spices.  And then, since I didn’t have soft light brown sugar, I substituted.  I do have some wonderful dark brown molasses sugar in the cupboard which I can happily eat by the teaspoonful.  It is very soft and has a kind of ‘burnt toffee’ flavour.  So, I thought I’d use that.

Now as I made up the mix I thought it looked a little dark.  But, since the sugar was one of the last things into the bowl, at that stage I thought I might as well go ahead and cook the cakes.  The result was a lot closer to a light Christmas pudding than carrot cake.  But without the hours of steaming and in bite sized portions.

So here’s what I did

Ingredients

2 eggs

120ml (4 fl oz) vegetable oil

200g (7oz) billingtons molasses raw cane sugar

300g (10 oz) grated carrot (weight when grated)

125g (5 oz) mixed dried fruit soaked overnight in rum

75g (3oz) walnuts, chopped

180g (6 1/2 oz) self-raising flour

Pinch of salt

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

About an inch stick of cinnamon,

A good half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg

6 cloves

Method

Preheat the oven to 180c

Blitz the spices in a spice grinder or use a pestle and mortar till you have a nice fine powdery mix

Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt and spices together

Mix all the dry ingredients together, first the carrot, fruit and nuts, then stir in the spiced flour mix

Beat the eggs lightly and add them and the oil to the mixture

Stir well

Put the mix into a muffin tray or cup-cake cases and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes

You should get 10-12 muffin sized ‘pudding cakes’

Allow to cool and store in an airtight tin on some kitchen roll if you haven’t cooked them in paper cases.

You can eat these straight from the oven, or warm these up in the microwave for 30 seconds and serve them as a dessert with a good dollop of cream or rum butter or eat them cold.  I made my rum butter using Karen Burn Booth’s recipe on her blog, Lavender and Lovage, with the same Billingtons Molasses sugar I used in the cakes.