carrot cake

For New Year’s Eve, we went to our friends’ house to celebrate and I volunteered to bring dessert. Ever since my best friend Mejdulene recommended that I try Claire Saffitz’ carrot cake recipe (from her book Dessert Person) a few months ago, I’ve now made the recipe twice. Saffitz says to bake three 9-inch rounds, but that makes a huge cake which is hard to eat in the gathering sizes that we’ve been having thanks to CoVID. So instead, I’ve baked the batter in cake pans that are half the size recommended, about 5 inches. Sadly, I only have one 5-inch pan, so I end up baking six layers consecutively, which takes several hours. You have to let the cake cool in the pan enough to get it out safely, and then you need to wash, grease, and line the pan before filling it and baking another layer.

The frosting is a brown butter cream cheese frosting with real vanilla seeds in it (from a halved vanilla bean). The cake also has carrots in it of course, along with both fresh and ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and toasted pecans. Half of the toasted pecans are bashed into a flour and mixed in with the dry ingredients. The other half are bashed into chunks and mixed in at the very end for some texture. Because I only have so many knuckles, I use the food processor to grate the carrots, so this is another recipe that requires two appliances: a stand mixer and a food processor. Add that into the lengthy and finicky baking process (to make a half cake) and you can see that this cake is a project.

And yet I’ve made it twice (or four times if you count each half cake as a cake by itself, which it really is since each half cake requires a crumb coat and then another layer on top - you can see that I’m no cake decorator!). So you can see that the cake is really good. It’s very good. Get a copy of Saffitz’ book and try it yourself. You won’t be disappointed!