Carrot Muffins with Cream Cheese Filling

When someone asked me last week, whether I could bake a carrot cake, I thought, why not bake muffins?! How about adding a cream cheese filling?!... If you want to bake these, you should probably not fill more than two thirds of your batter into the paper cups! Otherwise, it will spill while baking like mine did. Without a muffin pan, these would have been a disaster. This is what happens sometimes when I get all creative on Sunday morning :-) I think I have baked nicer looking muffins... But they were so tasty, I had to post them. I especially like the addition of walnuts and the different spices. 

Recipe
(adapted from: Leila Lindholm - Piece of Cake, the cream cheese filling is my addition)

3 eggs
240g sugar
180g flour
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 pinch of salt
1.5 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ginger powder
150ml sunflower oil
270g grated carrots
100g walnuts, coarsly chopped

200g cream cheese
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
50g sugar

Preheat the oven to 175°C and prepare a muffin pan with 12 paper cups (I ended up with 17 muffins although the recipe says 12 - and if I wouldn't have filled too much batter into each of the paper cups, I would have ended up with even more.)

Combine cream cheese, the egg yolk and the sugars and mix well. Set aside.

In a bowl, combine eggs and sugar and mix well until you have a pale and foamy batter. Combine the dry ingredients and add to the batter. Add sunflower oil, grated carrots and walnuts. Fill your batter into the prepared muffin pan. With a teaspoon, drop a dollop of the cream cheese batter onto each muffin.

Put the pan into the oven. The recipe says that the muffins should bake for about 15 minutes. I baked them for 25 minutes.