Carrot Cake Muffins

In recent years the American style muffin has become a staple in coffee shops and cafes across the world.
There are the basic Chocolate chip or Blueberry varieties but there some exciting and tasty combinations out there and ideas from everyday foods have been transferred to the muffin repertoire.
I love the idea of taking something and giving it a new twist and blowing peoples heads off with flavours and textures. This was my inspiration for my latest experiment, Carrot cake muffins.
I love carrot cake and would go as far to say that it is probably my favourite cake. I don't know if it is the cream cheese frosting or the hint of cinnamon but there is something warming and satisfying about the tea shop classic that makes me want more.
So I took my own recipe for carrot cake and transferred some of the elements to my basic muffin recipe. The result was astounding and turned out better than I could have ever imagined. Not only were the muffins lovely and moist but they were light, spicy and packed full of flavour.
Want to know how I made them, well here is how I did it.

Ingredients.
(makes approx 12)

2 eggs
250ml Whole milk
125ml Vegetable oil
100g Caster sugar
100g Demerera sugar
400g Self raising flour
2 heaped teaspoons of raisins
2 large carrots
1/2 an Apple
1 teaspoon of Cinnamon
1 teaspoon of salt

Method

First of all peel and grate the carrots and apple into a bowl and mix in the raisins
Mix together the eggs, oil, sugars and milk in a jug until frothy. An electric whisk is great for this.
Sieve the flour, salt and cinnamon into a separate a large bowl. Stir in the carrot and apple mixture with a fork.
Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the egg and sugar mixture and gradually mix. STOP as soon as all the flour has been incorporated with the egg mixture and a batter has been formed. This is the key to great muffins as you don't want to over work the flour.
Equally spoon the mixture into muffin cases and place on the middle shelf in a pre heated oven for 20 minutes Gas mark 6/200C
Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack before frosting.

For the frosting

250g Full fat cream cheese
125g icing sugar
50g butter
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Beat all the ingredients together until smooth and creamy. Top the cool muffins with the cream cheese frosting.

I topped my muffin with some carrots that I made from some orange sugar paste that I had left over from another recipe, but they are not essential, I was just showing off.

I hope you enjoy making and eating these muffins as much as I enjoyed them, I think I am going to have to go and make another batch after writing this.