- Hey, everyone, it's Barry here.
Welcome to My Virgin Kitchen.
I hope you are well.
I have just made this delicious
carrot and courgette cake.
It is phenomenal, with a cream
cheese frosting on top, ooh.
Shiver me timbers, it's good.
So this was a recipe that
kind of appeared by accident.
The other day, my new
neighbour knocked on my door,
and it was a bit of a surprise,
'cause it resembled kind of like the scene
from Dirty Dancing, with the watermelons.
I carried a watermelon.
My version of doing that right now
would probably a version
with Boston and Amy.
I carried a pug.
But enough of that.
There is so much I can do with courgettes,
and courgette cake was top of the list,
although I was planning on
doing something else today.
Here's a little sneak peek.
I was gonna do clear spring rolls.
Oh, yeah, this is an
example with a cucumber.
I actually hate cucumber.
It's weird how a courgette and a cucumber
is quite a similar thing,
although I actually love courgette
and detest a cucumber,
so I kind of wrapped it
in a transparent coffin.
So let's crack on and
make this the full epic
of what I've done by moi
is in the description down below
on myvirginkitchen.com, if
you are not there already,
you could be.
So potentially, you're gonna
have a normal sized courgette,
but if you don't, you
will find, like I did,
that weighing them out, it's kind of big.
(laughing)
It's like the weight of a small baby.
Basically, you just wanna
chop that thing down,
excluding any seeds,
until you've got the weight
that I put in the recipe,
pretty much the size of
a standard courgette.
Grab yourself a standard
cheese grater and grate away
at your chunks of
courgette, til you get nice,
shredded pieces of courgette.
We're gonna even go and
keep that skin on there.
I've never made a courgette cake before,
and it's kind of like a moist cake,
reminds me of carrot
cake, and I was thinking,
you know what?
Let's add some colour in there.
I bought the world's worst,
strangest kind of carrot thing
that Boston really wasn't
that interested in,
and grated that up, too.
So I have mountains of courgette,
and also a bit of orange,
and it's actually quite wet
once you grate it together,
so what you wanna do is squeeze the water
out of the courgette and the carrot.
I just let it sort of soak
into my chopping board,
or you could do it for sieve and that,
and that's pretty much done.
Chuck your courgettes and carrots
into a big old mixing bowl
and then you're gonna dump
in some dark brown sugar.
You're also gonna add in the oil.
I went for sunflower oil,
but you could use
vegetable oil if you like.
Earlier on, I had three eggs.
Crack those and put
them into a little dish,
whish them together, so
they're nice and beaten,
and I added that into the bowl, too.
We're going quite
citrusy on this, as well,
so I added a little bit of orange extract
in there, as well.
We're gonna properly ramp
up in a bit, you'll see.
We'll give that a good old stir,
and mingle that together, so it gets,
and then we have all the
wet stuff kind of together,
and then we have some self raising flour
with a little bit of baking
powder going in there, as well.
Not even sifting it, just
dumping it straight in,
and folding it through.
Do it very carefully.
In fact, if you're using a bigger bowl,
like I should've done,
you can go absolutely bonkers with that,
but carefully fold it in
until every nook and cranny
of that flour is in there, absorbed,
and it's kind of thickened the mixture.
That is your cake mix done.
So you're pretty much ready to go.
You just need to preheat your oven,
and then have your tin ready.
That is if you can locate it.
Can't find my loaf tin.
I did find the loaf tin in the end,
greased it with some butter,
and then cut out a strip
of baking parchment,
as best I could, and lined it, whoo,
so it sticks out both
sides of the loaf tin,
and that will actually
fail later, as you'll see,
but it should help give you leverage.
Push all of that cake
batter mixture into the tin.
You can give it a little tap,
if you want to settle it,
and that is it, ready to go.
It actually goes in the
oven for 45 minutes,
and boy, is it worth it.
Mm.
Whilst that's baking,
it is extremely tempting
to just sit and do nothing, like this.
("Hoe Down" by Aaron Copland)
But don't.
Make your cream cheese icing,
because the cream cheese icing,
kind of when you mix it together warms up,
so you wanna get it back to chill,
so it can be in the fridge chilling
while your cake is baking.
Get it?
Good.
Grab yourself some icing sugar,
and make it rain, baby.
Gonna dust that icing sugar
into a large mixing bowl,
all nice and sifted in there,
and then just dollop in your cream cheese.
That's full fat cream cheese.
You can get the naughty low fat stuff,
but we're making a cake,
so hey, it's up to you.
The full fat stuff does kinda. (kissing)
And this is where we add our citrus zing.
Not just one citrus fruit,
not just two, three:
orange, lemon and lime, and boom,
the zest is going in there.
Just the zest only.
You can add a teeny bit
of juice if you want
for even more zing, but I don't
wanna overcomplicate that.
It just really works as it is like that,
so I wouldn't really
mess with it, all right?
Kind of like one of those
buttons, do not press,
and you're like (barking).
So be sure to not overbeat it,
and then place it in the
fridge for the time being,
whilst we wait for the cake to finish.
You can check your cake is ready
by getting the old classic bamboo skewer.
I'm not sure who invented
that, but it's an amazing idea.
Bamboo skewer, straight in there.
If it comes out clean,
you know it's ready,
and remember, it'll be a moist cake.
So take it out of the
oven to cool initially,
and then, of course, you
should be able to use
your baking parchment
thing to lift the cake out.
Mine kind of ripped, so
I had to use a spatula,
and hook it out and then sit in on there,
peel the paper off the bottom, of course,
and then let it cool fully,
'cause if you put your
cream cheese on too early,
it'll just run off.
And you don't want that.
(blowing raspberry)
Once the cake is fully cooled,
you're gonna spread that frosting on top,
and then add some even more zest on top,
just to multicolor it and
make it look gorgeous.
You could eat it straightaway,
but I would recommend
putting it in the fridge
to firm up that icing before schlicing it,
schlicing, (laughing)
slicing it into nice,
thick loafy chunks.
And boy was that good.
That is sensational.
So there we go.
A citrusy courgette carrot cake,
absolutely phenomenal, moist, mm.
Try it, send me a picture
at My Virgin Kitchen.
That is it.
That is it.
I had to film in this style
because my camera played up.
But maybe you prefer it this way.
I don't know, bye! (smacking)
