Carrot Cake

Some say our modern-day carrot cake spawned from the British “carrot pudding” (a boiled carrot stuffed with spices, nuts, and/or fruits), while others think it to be a mid-20th-century, ration-provoked recipe (supposedly, during a time when sugar was scarce, carrots were used as a sweetener instead). Regardless of its history, carrot cake tastes little of carrots and mostly of its accompanying spices, nuts, and/or fruits. It can be as simple as a moist, spongy cake perfumed with warming spices, or as rabbit-y as a trail mix tenuously bound by cake batter. The recipe below offers up a more austere, elegant version—but if you demand the addition of nuts (whether walnuts or pecans), or raisins, or both, there are some suggestions below. Fine-grating with a microplane yields carrot shreds—even wisps!—that better meld with the batter, and make for a more ubiquitous carrot flavor, without the salad-y texture. The addition of cream cheese frosting is a wholly contemporary, but delicious, addition to this cake. Two parts butter to one part cream cheese keeps the frosting ultra-fluffy, while the sneaky additions of vinegar and salt keeps it from being too sweet. Adding heavy cream thins the frosting to a spreadable consistency. For a more in-depth look at how to level and frost a cake, go here. Leveling cake layers, while not totally necessary, does make for a more structurally-sound, sharp-looking layer cake. And for that extra attention and care, the baker gets rewarded with cake scraps snacks.

Unbalanced

% Daily Values based on a 2,000 calorie diet

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