Carrot cake with cream cheese icing

Ingredients

Cake

• 250 g carrots
• 6 egg yolks
• 250 g sugar
• A good pinch of salt
• Grated zest of 1 organic lemon
• 6 egg whites
• 300 g grated, unblanched almonds
• 100 g flour
• 150 g apricot jam

Icing

• 400 g cream cheese
• 100 g yoghurt
• 100 g icing sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Line the base of a 25 x 25cm tin with baking paper.

2. For the cake mixture, peel the carrots and grate very finely – there shouldn't be any large pieces or strings. Put the egg yolks into a bowl with one-third of the sugar, the salt and lemon zest, and mix until foamy. Beat the egg whites until stiff, trickling in the rest of the sugar, then continue beating until firm.

3. Mix the grated almonds with the flour and the grated carrots. Now fold one-third of the beaten egg whites into the egg yolk mixture and mix very well. Then put the rest of the egg whites on top of the mixture and sprinkle with the almond mixture. Mix carefully with a wooden spoon.

4. Spread the mixture smoothly in the tin and bake in the preheated oven for about 50 minutes. Take out and leave to cool in the tin. Then turn out on to baking parchment so that the smooth bottom of the cake is uppermost. Spread the top and sides of the cake evenly with hot apricot jam. Cool. 

5. For the icing, mix the cream cheese with the yoghurt and icing sugar until smooth. Coat the cake with the icing and chill until time to serve.