Simple cake recipes are generally easy to come by if you want a plain chocolate or vanilla sponge, but that’s not always the case for carrot cake. The delicious formula, which often combines grated carrot with brown sugar and chopped walnuts, can be lengthy to recreate at home. That is without the help of one versatile ingredient: condensed milk.
A YouTuber, Delight Recipe, shared their quirky cake formula online: “Mix condensed milk with carrots, and you will be surprised by the results.” Made with “simple ingredients”, the cake has no sugar or butter, and you don’t need to turn on the oven to cook it. Instead, the cake is steamed on the stove in a pan of boiling water.
According to a baking expert at Ultimate Om Noms, the water bath cooking method provides a more even and slower heat source than the direct heat of your oven.
Cooking cakes this way prevents the mixture from rapidly expanding, which can lead to disappointing cracking of cake tops.
The baking expert said: “It’s recommended to fill the water bath up to halfway or two-thirds of the cake pan, leaving enough room between the cake tin and the water bath pan for hot water to circulate.”
Carrot cake recipe
Ingredients
- One large carrot, sliced
- Two eggs
- Half a cup/ 155ml of condensed milk
- One cup/ 120g plain flour
- One tsp baking powder
- Four tsp milk
Equipment
- Stick blender
- Cake tin
- Saucepan
Method
Add the chopped carrot to a bowl and then crack in the eggs. You can finely grate the carrot into the bowl if you prefer, and this is advised if you don’t have a blender.
Blitz the eggs and carrot until smooth, then pour the condensed milk and stir to combine. Sieve the flour a little at a time, folding it as you go.
Follow with the baking powder and milk, then stir everything together once more to finish the cake mixture. Find a watertight cake pan (not one with a removable base or sides), and line it with greaseproof paper.
Pour the mixture into the tin and carefully transfer the whole tin to the base of a saucepan. Pour boiling water from the kettle around the cake tin to around two-thirds of its height, and leave on the stove over low heat for 30 minutes.
Test with a skewer to see if it comes out clean when inserted into the cake. If necessary, cook for a few minutes longer. Allow the water to cool before removing the cake tin from the saucepan.
Leave it on the side for a while to cool down, then take a large plate and place it on top of the cake. Swiftly flip the plate to turn the cake out onto it – (it will be upside down). Flip the cake over once cooled to avoid crumbling, then dust with icing sugar to serve.
