Assorted Ravings of the Slightly-Weird

Carrot Cake!

Another food-related post.

If there's one cake that I can make well, it's carrot cake. (And I'm talking about the angmoh version here, not the Chinese one, although I love that too.) I've been making this since I was in high school and I took the recipe from a Betty Crocker cookbook that my mom had lying around somewhere. If I recall correctly, I had eaten a delicious version during one family vacation to Whistler and wanted to recreate it. And the Betty Crocker version was so simple that I could do everything by hand. Saves a lot of cleaning up, which is a major plus point in my book.

There's only been one time that this cake turned out horribly and that was when I attempted to be health-conscious and substituted apple juice for vegetable oil. In my defence, I was told by a source (a very powerful source!) that this version was not only healthy but that you couldn't tell the difference.

Unfortunately, you could. Instead of being moist and light like the usual recipe, the apple-sauce version turned out to be very dense and very chewy. My sister said it was the worst carrot cake she'd ever eaten and that if she hadn't had carrot cake before she would never eat it again. So I guess the moral of the story is, don't skimp on the oil. It's there for a reason!

Last weekend, I decided to make a cake for my friend's birthday and went back to good ol' Betty. The only variation that I added to the recipe was lemon peel, which I found added more flavour to the mix. As for the cream cheese frosting, I chose a version with some butter and a lot more icing sugar to try and make the frosting stiffer. (Stiffer frosting enables easier decoration that's longer-lasting as well.)

Here are the pics. I had excess batter so we made cupcakes as well, and my sister made the carrots with coloured fondant. I made the leaves!

From this to...

this!

Side view: we had extra pistachios lying around so we made a border out of those

Carrot cupcakes

Close-up of the fondant carrot

Hopefully it was worth the effort!

Posted by scrabbyfoo at August 7, 2007 04:39 PM