There was a strong tradition of cake making at home in 1950’s Ireland when I was growing up. The “shop” cake was definitely considered second rate and the “home made” a superior product.
Now my mother was a perennial baker, her Chocolate Éclairs and her Pavlovas were superb, she was also a dab hand at the Fairy Cakes and the Fruit Cake and the sponge.
Her other offering, the sometimes chocolate sometimes coffee cake just weren’t so successful.
She made them in the usual traditional fashion, beating together margarine and sugar adding eggs and flour and cocoa powder and icing the finished product with icing powder mixed with cocoa.

The result was just dry and I could never see the point of it.
It wasn’t until I started to read French cookbooks for pleasure in my early twenties that I discovered the lengths that French cooks would go to avoid this dryness in a cake.
One of their tricks was the substitution of some or all of the flour with ground almonds, another was the liberal distribution of butter through the batter. (The amount of butter in a good Brioche is a cardiac nightmare)
All these tricks are of course quite expensive , there is nothing cheap about either butter or almonds.
It must have been in the seventies that a little inexpensive trick from America began to trickle into Ireland- The Carrot Cake.
This is a really effective of keeping a cake moist without breaking the bank.

The following is my reading of this, the small amount of ground almonds and fresh bite of the stem ginger cuts through the carrot making a truly moist cake without any feeling of worthiness.


Carrot and Ginger Cake

(You will need a jar of Chinese Stem Ginger in Syrup)

125g (4 oz.) Unsalted Butter -softened
90g (3oz.) Dark Brown Sugar
125g (4 oz.) Self Raising Flour
1 level Teaspoon Baking Powder
2 Eggs
2 Tablespoons Syrup from the Ginger Jar
3 Knobs of Ginger Chopped
125g (4 oz.) Carrot -coarsely grated
2 Tablespoons Ground Almonds


Preheat the oven to Gas 4, 175C, 350F.

Using a food processor or a beater ( or even by hand) mix together the butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, eggs and syrup.
Mix together with a spoon the carrot, ginger and almonds and fold them into the other ingredients.
Line a 500g (1lb.) loaf tin with non-stick paper and pour in the batter.
Bake at the set temperature for 45mts. (Test with a skewer before removing)
This is very good served warm with yoghurt on the side.