It was the hubby’s birthday this week so naturally I had to bake him something sweet. The hubby settled on carrot cake in the end, mainly because we still can’t get any self raising flour anywhere. We had to settle for wholemeal self raising flour in the end, meaning we needed a wet recipe, so carrot cake it was!

Apparently wholemeal self raising flour dries out most cake recipes. Advice online states to increase the amount of wet ingredients to the mix when using wholemeal self raising flour. I did not. I reduced the amount of wholemeal self raising flour by the tiniest amount. I think the carrot cake turned out great in the end, not as moist as usual with self raising flour, but the hubby didn’t notice.

Here are the ingredients for the cake. The recipe called for light muscovado sugar, but supermarkets didn’t have any, so I had to settle for light brown sugar in the end as the closest replacement.

The light brown sugar was ok to use, but I think next time if I can I’ll try to stick with light muscovado sugar. 

It was only after I tipped in the grated carrots and tried mixing it in that I realised how much the wholemeal self raising flour was absorbing all the liquids. It took a lot longer mixing in the carrots this time compared to usual. This is before:

And this is after. Usually the grated carrot is not as visible in a wetter cake mix. 

Surprisingly filled up two cake tins quite well though. 

The cake rose quite well actually. Recently cakes I’ve baked had sunk in the middle, which could be due to banging the oven door shut at the halfway point when I turn the cake tins round. This time I was sure to close the oven door really slowly and gently, so as not to deflate the cakes. It seemed to have worked. Or maybe it was the wholemeal self raising flour that prevented a sunken middle?

And here are the icing ingredients. No replacements needed for these, evidently supermarkets have icing ingredients well stocked up.

I ended up slathering the icing on top of the cake, as I was afraid of using it all up in the middle. But turned out I didn’t use enough icing in the middle of the cake, as it was quite top heavy with the icing. 

And walnuts as the finishing touch! The recipe stated pecans but I feel walnuts always tastes better with carrot cake. And as I absolutely love walnuts, I basically tipped the whole pack on top of the cake!

Mm mmm mmm. You can kind of see how much icing is on top compared to the middle of the cake. 

The walnuts did make cutting the cake a little more tricky, but other than that, can’t really complain. Especially if I was the only one to think it wasn’t as moist as usual with normal self raising flour.