An old favourite, carrot cake

We offer carrot cake as one of the standard flavours we can make, however I haven't done one for a while.  A friend has ordered one for her birthday next month, so I felt it was high time the recipe was practiced, to make sure it'd be ready.  I've made this recipe successfully a few times, but always in a large traybake tin.  So this was a new way, in a round tin for presentation.  Luckily, after my last disaster - sorry cake, I used a deep enough tin and the mix had plenty of room to rise.  And it did, beautifully.  But I feel it'll need another 10 minutes or so cooking time next time, the lower half seems less well-done than I would have liked (proof will be in the tasting tomorrow).  Annoyingly, an inserted skewer comes out clean at this stage of cooking/baking even though the cake isn't totally done.  Makes it quite tricky to judge without tasting...  I wonder what other home-bakers do??

Then it was a case of seeing how much icing the recipe made, when translated to a round layered cake.  The height of the final product was such that it could, conceivably, be layered three rather than two times.  I just did two layers, and only managed enough cream cheese with orange zest icing to do the central layer and a thick-ish one on top.  Visual reviews are positive though, which is encouraging.  Thanks!