Kumara this winter has been on special – $1.99/kg – so I naturally stocked up and then had to find ways of consuming it all: you can only soup so much…this kumara cake had a certain appeal…It’s quite simple (I found the recipe on http://www.foodbox.co.nz)

What you need:

• 150 grams of butter
• 1 cup of sugar (I used raw sugar but next time will use a banana or two)
• 2 cups of flour ( I used high-grade but next time will use my own home-ground flour)
• 3 teaspoons of baking powder
• 2 teaspoons of cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 1/2 a teaspoon of ginger powder
• 1/2 a teaspoon of salt (I used black sea salt)
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 4 eggs
• 3 cups of peeled and grated kumara
• 1 cup of chopped walnuts

What you do:

• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees
• Melt the butter and blend in the sugar
• Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl and make a well in the middle.
• Mix in the wet ingredients.
• Mix through the kumara and walnuts into a thick wet mix and pour it into a lined cake tin.
• Bake it for around an hour til a skewer comes out clean.
• Once it’s cool, remove it from the cake tin and peel away the baking paper.

Now the good bit…the icing…

Take 2 tablespoons of melted butter, 60 grams of cream cheese, a cup of icing sugar and teaspoon of lemon rind and blend them with a hand blender until the mix is really smooth.

Spread this evenly over the cooled kumara cake…

Don’t forget to lick the spoon…

Insights

Tasty great, with a nice twist between the spice in the cake and lemon of the icing…still a bit dry but I hope that subbing a couple of bananas for the sugar will fix that plus paying more attention to baking times i.e. checking to see if it passes the test before the recommended hour of baking is up…