Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Seriously good carrot cake

A few weeks ago I had a sweets craving, and decided to make carrot cake. Fortunately for me, I only had part of the ingredients that I needed on hand and double of the others. So, I threw them together. And, to my surprise, it was good! Really good. Ed scarfed it down too, and he's not much of a sweets person.

I'm going to attempt to duplicate it tomorrow for my Mom's birthday, and hopefully this will be a record for future reference.

I did make a cream cheese frosting, but honestly, it was overkill, so I'm not gonna post it here.

The recipe is based on the Joy of Cooking, except one major difference: the amount of carrots are doubled, butter replaces the vegetable oil, and the carrots I used were grated, frozen, and then thawed. The freezing definetely had an impact on the carrots. They were partially broken down, making them more tender and rendering some of the carrot juice. The freezing may have altered the sugars making the carrots sweeter, but I cannot say for sure.

Here goes.

Carrot cake:

Aim for all ingredients to be at room temperature.

Whisk together: 1 and 1/3 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1.5t baking soda, 1t baking powder, 1t cinnamon, 1/2t cloves, 1/2 t nutmeg, 1/2 allspice, 1t kosher salt.

In another bowl, combine: 1 cup melted butter (use some of this butter to grease the pan), 3 large eggs, 3 cups of grated carrots, frozen and then thawed, 1 cup walnuts.

Combine both. Scrape into a greased 8x8 (or so) pan and bake in a 350 oven until cooked (start checking after 20 minutes or so).

yum yum.

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