Carrot Cupcakes with Cream-Cheese Icing

I had arranged a playdate with my friend V one Saturday, and it afforded me the opportunity to bake again (yay!).

I am not a carrot cake fan (I am a chinese carrot cake fan though...), and this recipe, with its cream-cheese icing appeared rather odd indeed. To me, dessert should involve chocolate, possibly vanilla, and maybe fruit, but certainly never vegetables. But my friend V likes carrot cakes, and I wanted something my boy could eat (he hates blueberries and raisins, chocolates are currently banned, and so are conventional cakes). So this looked like the perfect recipe. It just sounded so healthy (ignoring of course the amount of icing sugar that goes into the topping) - my boy was getting his veggies, and instead of butter it calls for sunflower oil! It was also an opportunity to use the (a) light mucovado sugar that has been sitting in my cupboard since the initial wave of shopping for nigella-esque ingredients; (b) half a tub of cream cheese in the fridge left-over from baking cheesecake.

It was a bit fiddly and wasn't as domestic goddess-ly relaxing as some of the other recipes. This one involved grating carrots, zesting lemons AND oranges, chopping walnuts. Even after the cupcakes were in the oven, you couldn't relax with a nice cuppa while waiting for them to be done, you had to make the icing, which also involved the hard work of beating the cream-cheese, sieving the icing sugar (which I halved), and squeezing some lime juice.

I must say, the cupcakes sans icing were surprisingly light (and maybe a bit boring). I had used less than the 100g light muscovado sugar in the recipe, and I think this is one recipe which you can actually use the full amount of sugar Nigella indicates. When paired with the cream-cheese icing, which on its own was sickeningly sweet, the cupcake become irresistible! One was certainly not enough. We had seconds. And more.