Banana and Carrot Cake

"Can I come over to use your oven?"

Ju Vern spends her first crutch-less afternoon in our kitchen, determined to turn out a birthday-worthy banana-carrot cake after having hobbled her way through half of London with a backpack full of ingredients. I, unsurprisingly, couldn't think of a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

As a child, I never liked carrot cakes, often wondering why anyone would want to make a cake out of vegetables and not chocolate. I think it's one of those things that has grown on me, the same way fruitcake has - nowadays, I'd rarely say no to a slice of carrot cake, especially if it's topped with some of that delicious cream cheese frosting.

The chosen recipe that afternoon was one from the Waitrose website, the Banana and Carrot Cake Recipe, an incredibly simple recipe that gives you a beautifully moist cake and a cream cheese frosting that's so good you'd want to eat it with a spoon. The bananas give the cake a natural sweetness that complements the subtle flavour of the carrots wonderfully. We followed the recipe through and through, only swapping the walnut pieces for almond flakes as the supermarket had run out of walnut pieces. Definitely birthday-worthy - in fact, we couldn't help but shortchange the birthday boy a little by nicking a portion of the cake for ourselves.

I always love baking with company - there's nothing like the shared triumph of a successful venture.