Carrot Cupcakes with Orange Frosting

Star Q

i.  A Go At Flamingo

ii.  Turn To Our Tweets

iii.  Beautiful School

I am a weekend baker!  And it has been quite some me since I baked because my weekends have been occupied with tonnes of activities.  There was a weekend when my family and I went all the way to Seremban because someone wanted to buy a new pair of clothes.  Another weekend we went to Seremban to visit my father-in-law who was admitted to hospital.  All these plus the fact that the weekends seem to be getting shorter and shorter to me.

However, equipped with the desire to bake, I ransacked my pantry and my fridge and found enough ingredients (plus or minus a few) to make some carrot cupcakes.  Like I mentioned earlier, I seem to feel that my weekends seem to be getting short.  With that in mind, I decided to use the simplest carrot cake recipe I have.

I did say I was missinSg an ingredient or two.  In this case I realized I did not have any bananas that the recipe asked for, so I substituted it by doubling the quantity of the grated carrot.  Plus the banana was supposed to add to the aroma of the cake, so I added some orange zest!  And the recipe called for cinnamon powder, which I did not have and happily omitted.

• 1/4 pint sunflower oil (I used corn oil) 
• 8 oz SR flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 5 oz light brown sugar
• 6 oz grated carrots
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbs milk
• Grated zest of 1 orange

Preheat oven at 160 C.  Combine all the ingredients in a bowl.  Mix until thoroughly blended.  Scoop batter into paper cups and bake for about 20 minutes of until a tooth inserted into the centre of one of the cupcakes comes out clean.  Set aside to cool completely.

Orange glaze :

• 1 cup icing sugar
• 1 or 2 tsp freshly squeezed orange juice.

Mix the sugar and orange juice together until it reaches the consistency of thick cream.  Drizzle the glaze onto the cupcakes and leave aside for the glaze to set.