Carrot, banana and ginger cake - a snack out of hours

3.45 pm on Saturday I suddenly got an incredible yen for something sweet, 15 minutes before the shop in the village nearby closed. I realised I wasn’t going to be able to make it, and I really didn’t feel like driving 20 km to the nearest town. 

A rummage around in the cupboards and fridge produced some carrots, bananas and a piece of ginger which started looking really sad. 

Living in the countryside we can’t just nip out and get goodies when we feel like it. Well, of course we can, but it isn’t just going to the corner shop to grab something. It means getting in the car and driving to the village or, if it´s outside of their fairly limited opening hours, to the town 20 km away. Even in town you won´t find a 24 hour open shop or garage, the nearest one is 100 km away. You soon learn to plan and to be inventive, or you simply go without. 

Wearing my thinking cap I made a cake which turned out to be fabulous. Recipe as follows; 

Carrot, banana and ginger cake with a ginger thin flavoured cream cheese frosting 

Ingredients: 

For cake 

3 eggs 

175 g butter 

175 g plain flour 

100 g sugar 

175 g grated carrot 

2 ripe bananas, mashed 

A thumb sized piece of ginger, grated 

1 orange, zest and juice of. 

2 tsp baking soda 

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda 

1 tsp cinnamon 

½ tsp grated nutmeg 

A pinch of salt 

For frosting (optional) 

100 g cream cheese 

100 g butter 

100 g icing sugar 

1 tsp ginger thin spice mix (available in Sweden as ”pepparkakskrydda” but you can mix your own using this recipe.) 

A tiny pinch of salt 

For decoration 

Cookie crumbs, I used gingersnaps. 

Method: 

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C 
2. Weigh up your ingredients separately. 
3. Grease a cake tin. 
4. In a little bit of the flour, mix in the spices, salt, baking soda and bicarbonate. Set aside. 
5. Mix butter sugar eggs and spices until fluffy, unless you’re Arnie you may want to use an electric whisk. 
6. Fold in grated carrot, ginger and the mashed banana. 
7. Using The electric whisk, mix the flour mixed with the raising agents and spices into the batter. Blend carefully. 
8. Mix in the rest of the flour. 
9. Pour batter in the tin and bake for roughly 1 hour. You can check if it’s ready by sticking a fork in the middle of the cake. If it comes out dry the cake is ready. 
10. Let the cake cool until it’s room temperature before putting the frosting on. If it’s warmer than that the frosting will melt, as I discovered to my peril a while back when I ended up having to serve a cake swimming in melted frosting. 

The frosting is made by simply mixing the ingredients well and then smearing it on the cake. This is probably obvious to most people, but if you – like me – are fairly useless as a cake maker, just mix and smear.