carrot cake with mascarpone topping

This was the first weekly bake off challenge.  I am not going to publish all these recipes for these as think I might get in trouble from the publishers! But HERE is the link to the offical website for this cake.

Now This cake was delicious.  But it's not what I would class as a carrot cake.  For a start there are bananas in it. The texture for me was more muffiny.  And indeed it was made in a similar way with wet ingredients and dry mixed seperately then stirred together.  The cake batter was a really weird ugly looking mix, which looked really sloppy.  Turned out well though.

My older son has an aversion to most nuts.  He has stopped claiming to be allergic, which caused a panic at school once, and just says I don't like them these days.  So with him in mind I omitted the walnuts and subbed them for the same weight of golden raisins.  I left the topping plain vanilla with no bits in. Was brilliant.  Both boys raved over it.  Am not sure if it was because it was that brillliant or if because they were so shocked I had made a cake on a Monday!  All in all though was a very easy cake to make, a crowd pleaser to.  But in future if asked I am calling it banana and carrot cake as I feel the banana overpowers the carrot.

This was after it had cooled a bit out of the oven,  When it came out it was very domed and cracked and I thought it would look terrible iced.  But it calmed and looked flatter.

not a great pic as you can see phone shadow ;o/ but this is with the vanilla, mascarpone topping. This we would of happily eaten just on it's own.  After being in fridge overnight the texture of the topping was a lot better for the cake we felt. 

And a slice shot, colour is a slight bit off but it sort of shows the texture, dense but light at the same time.