When my sister picked carrot cake as her birthday dessert of choice, I heard “glittery icing carrots”. Yes, I should probably get my hearing checked. # 308: Carrot Cake

Do you associate carrot cake with a certain time of year? I fully connect the smell of a spice cake with Fall / Winter and was fully prepared to feel odd about making one in August.

Joke’s on me though: not only did it make the kitchen smell amazing, but the world doesn’t seem to want to limit access to the classic carrot cake. I couldn’t find an agreed upon “season” for it. The correct season is just whenever you want to eat it!

Fun fact time! Drum roll please… while cream cheese came onto the scene in the 1870s (as an accidentally wrong version of neufchâtel cheese), turning it into a frosting took another hundred years. A tangier version of its overly-sweet cousin buttercream, it now even has it’s own National Day: March 31st.

I ended up skipping the chopped nuts and rum-soaked raisins the recipe called for due to birthday girl allergies. And also due to a suspicion that the raisins might be a weird texture without crunchy nuts to balance them out.

Whisking spices into the flour is my personal zen sand garden.

While not as dramatic as creaming sugar and butter into fluffy clouds, oil-based batters still go through a transformation. It still changes color and consistency as the sugar dissolves and the batter gobbles up air.

Since we’re missing out on some texture without other add-ins, I went with a rougher grating for the carrots. Don’t want the star of the show to melt into invisibility!

Are you a toothpick-test kind of person? Or a GBBO-style cake listener? I’m forever and always a toothpick tester, but recently have been pulling cakes out before the toothpick is completely clean. My current goal is moist crumbs with no raw batter. That way it doesn’t overbake in the pan while it’s cooling on a rack!

Guess who went to the store three different times the week before making this cake and managed to forget powdered sugar each time? *raises hand* Being stubborn, I decided to try blitzing my own at home instead of walking the 5 minutes back to the store. Turning granulated sugar into powder should be an easy task for a food processor, right? After 15 minutes, the sugar was more on the powdery end of the spectrum but was still resolutely gritty. Le sigh.

I guess the sugar heard my thoughts about wanting more texture in the cake and decided to volunteer as tribute.

Oh hi beautiful! I popped it back into the fridge for 30 minutes to let the crumb coat set. Who is this patient human being? Hardly know her.

My sneaky cake decorating hack: assemble the cake directly on the cake carrier bottom, and then place that on top of the mini lazy susan (WHY do we still call it that? Sorry to the Susans of the world) that I use in my pantry. My macgyvered decorating stand spins beautifully and I don’t have to transfer a fully decorated cake to a new container. Voila!

So the cream cheese icing literally ate the edible glitter. I added more than I normally would and it just disappeared! The nerve of some icings, I’m telling you.

Food coloring to the rescue.

It didn’t hit me until I was popping these into the freezer to set, that cream cheese doesn’t freeze solid. Don’t be me and have to transfer squishy icing carrots on to your cake… Pipe them directly on to your cake or use regular buttercream for the decorations.

I got some of them to transfer without squidging. Success!

Almost like an artsy carrot clock.

I really couldn’t let the lack of glitter go, but the icing was too soft to paint edible glitter on top… sooo yeah. This happened. I’ve made better decisions in my life, I know.

My sister said that when the candles were lit on the cake, she could suddenly see all the glitter in the icing carrots. I’ll take it!

Happy munching!

Recipe from Bon Appetit: “BAs Best Carrot Cake” (sadly behind a paywall now)