Courgette Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

I still have more courgettes coming out my ears, I picked eight more today! So I've branched out into courgette cakes, which was a suggestion by Hope of Hopie's Kitchen, my adopter in adopt-a-blogger 3. I was really dubious about courgette cake, so I tried some in a cafe first and really enjoyed it. I found a really good recipe on foodiesite.com just by doing a google search and made a monster of a cake!



It was really moist and had a beautiful texture, you couldn't really see or taste the courgette in the cake, probably because they were yellow courgette and I was thrilled at how well it turned out. I took it to Bath with me and we ate it as my sister's birthday cake. Even my 14 month old niece loved it! The cream cheese frosting turned out quite yellow and I'm, not sure why but my sister loved the frosting!



Courgette Cake

250g butter, broken up into pieces (at room temperature)
250g (1 cup) caster sugar or brown sugar
4 eggs
350g (3 cups) self raising flour
juice and zest of 1 an orange
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp mixed spice
350g (3 cups) courgette, grated
50g (1/2 cup) walnuts, roughly chopped
80g (1/2 cup) sultanas

Cream Cheese Icing
125g cream cheese
50g unsalted butter
300g icing sugar

Courgette Cake: Grease and line a 25cm deep cake tin with baking paper. Preheat an oven to 180°C.

Place the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat until creamy. Add the eggs one at a time while mixing until the eggs are well incorporated.

Sieve the flour with the cinnamon and mixed spice. Fold in a 1/3 of the flour, followed by 1/2 of the orange juice and zest, repeat this using the remaining flour and orange, so that all the ingredients are well combined. Stir in the courgette, walnuts and sultanas and incorporate well.

Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin and place on the centre shelf of the preheated oven. Leave the cake to cook for around 1 hour or until the cake is firm to touch (if preparing 2x20cm cake tins, reduce the cooking time to 30-40 minutes). Turn the cake out on a rack and allow to cool.

Orange Cream Cheese Icing: Beat the cream cheese and butter together until creamy. Gradually beat in the icing sugar until you have a smooth creamy icing. Spread over the cooled cake. If you have prepared 2x20cm cakes, spread some lemon curd over the top of the one and sandwich the two cakes together and then cover the top and sides of the cake with the cream cheese frosting.