← Replies in Carrot Cake w/ Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe

So here's the thing, the sponge/actual cake is absolutely delicious. The instructions are understandable, if a little cramped, but it came out really really good. (Just a quick tip, if your oven doesn't do Celsius and you don't know how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, 325° F worked perfectly for me) But the frosting? An absolute mess. There are not enough pictures or well-written instructions to make the frosting listed in the actual recipe. I ruined all of the white chocolate and butter; plus I preemptively took the pans off the stove and ran outside to avoid triggering my smoke alarms. You need a proper double boiler set-up, extremely good ventilation, and a good understanding of how to make frosting from scratch. Honestly, even if the recipe included pictures of the process, that wouldn't be enough for most people; a full in-depth video tutorial would be required for most people to follow along with such a complicated recipe. I gave up after an hour of attempting to salvage the recipe and found a different cream-cheese frosting recipe online which was delicious. By the time I was supposed to make the fondant carrots, I said "no way" and used food coloring to dye some of the frosting orange and green and made a carrot-based color "motif" instead. This whole cake requires a ton of labor and time. The actual baking time is really short but the preparation took me 3 hours. That is not an exaggeration, but to be fair I'm a pretty slow baker. The baking itself took me a little less than an hour, but I split the baking into three completely different sized pans (as you can see from my photo) so I have no idea whether the baking times the author listed are correct. Just a warning I have no idea whether the author placed all three batches into three separate pans and placed them into the same oven at the same time. Depending on how many pans you have in the oven, your bake time will be different because having multiple pans will cause each cake to bake at a different rate depending on its position in your oven. Furthermore, if you don't have three of the same-sized pans (which I didn't) the baking time will be more than double or triple as long because you will need to wait for each cake to completely cool, transfer the finished cake to another surface, wash the pan, then add the next serving of batter to the newly cleaned pan, reheat the oven (if you previously turned it off), and then bake it for the full time. This cake took me more than six hours to make. Experienced bakers and well-prepared novices can probably halve that time and make a better product. Less-prepared or ill-equiped intermediate bakers can probably do the cake in five hours. Well-prepared beginner bakers could also probably do it in five hours. But ill-equiped beginner bakers might spend eight to nine hours on the whole cake (including frosting and decorations) but will probably give up before finishing the whole thing or googling supplemental information or separate recipes. Tldr: The sponge recipe is literally the most delicious carrot cake I've ever eaten, but I was completely unable to make the frosting and wouldn't recommend trying to make the whole recipe based solely on the author's specifications.