Icelandic carrot cake

with or without cream cheese coating
 

This Gulrótarkaka has become established in our family and I feel like I bake it at least once a month, often at the special request of my daughter.

Nowadays I like to vary it, sometimes I bake the dough in two springform pans (baking time then approx. 30 - 40 minutes), make twice the amount of cream (i.e. 300 mascarpone, 400 g cream cheese, etc.) and then put the whole thing like this in the photo in the style of a "naked cake".


Ingredients:

250 g soft butter
250 g brown sugar
5 eggs (separate!)
Zest and juice of 1 orange
170 g flour
1 tsp baking powder
100 g almonds, chopped
100 g walnuts, chopped
250 g carrots, peeled and grated
sea-salt

For the coating

150 g mascarpone
200 g cream cheese
100 g powdered sugar, sifted
Zest and juice of 1 lime

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 °F (180 °C).

Beat the butter and brown sugar until fluffy, then add the egg yolks one at a time, followed by the orange zest and orange juice. Then add the flour and baking powder, then the chopped almonds and walnuts to the dough, as well as the grated carrots.

In a separate bowl, beat the 5 egg whites with a pinch of sea salt until stiff and carefully fold into the remaining dough.

Then put the finished dough into a buttered (or lined with baking paper) cake pan and bake in the oven for at least 45 minutes until golden brown. Be careful - the dough tends to be “soggy” in the bottom middle, so bake it a little longer and test with a wooden stick to make sure everything is baked through!

Let the cake cool for at least an hour.

To make the coating, stir all the ingredients together and then spread the mixture over the top and sides of the cake. Decorate as desired with a pinch of chopped walnuts, walnut halves, chopped almonds or similar.

If possible, prepare the carrot cake the day before so that everything goes well!

Annotation:

If time is of the essence, you can simply cover the cake with a normal powdered sugar or lemon icing instead of the cream cheese coating.

Bon appetit!

[Translated from here.]