Carrot cupcakes with lime cream cheese frosting

I love having an excuse to cook and bake and the holidays are always a great one. After Christmas Easter is the first time many families have the opportunity to meet up again especially if you live far away from your family, like me. I enjoy making something at home to take to these family gatherings, I find it is like a gift that you take, it makes others happy. And what I make is often of the sweet kind.

This Easter my sweet gift is carrot cupcakes with a lime cream cheese frosting. You can’t have Easter without carrots! I have come across many carrot cake recipes that take a lot of spices such as cinnamon and cloves, but to me these spices remind me of the autumn season, so I decided to make a spring version of this recipe and I must say I was proud of the result.

Carrot cupcakes with lime cream cheese frosting (makes 12)

For the cupcakes:

125g butter, at room temperature

80g muscovado sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 eggs

100g plain flour

1 tbsp baking powder

100g almonds or hazelnuts, ground

150g carrots, grated

100g white chocolate, finely chopped or chips

For the icing:

300g icing sugar, sieved

50g unsalted butter, at room temperature

125g full fat cream cheese, cold

2 tbsp lime juice

1 tsp lime zest

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. With an electric mixer beat the sugar and butter together until you get a pale cream mixture. Add the vanilla essence and eggs until it’s all mixed well. Sieve the baking powder and flour together and add the ground nuts, slowly mixing it all until it’s incorporated. Finally add the carrots and chopped chocolate. Pour the batter into 12 cases and bake for 20-25 minutes, until they are golden and a toothpick comes out clean when poking the middle. Leave it to cool on a rack.

2. For the frosting, beat with an electric mixer on medium speed the icing sugar and butter. Add the cream chese, juice and zest and mix again until all ingredients are well incorporated, then you can put the speed up to high and mix for another 4-5 minutes, until the icing is light and airy.

To decorate the icing I also chopped 200g of pistachios and sprinkled it on top. I also added little carrots made of marzipan that I came across in the supermarket. Thought they looked very cute on the outside, and on the inside they kept nice and moist. That’s all you want from cupcakes.

Whether you decide to bake cupcakes or not this week, we wish you all a very happy Easter and see you on the next post!