Fancy-ass phone photo of the leftover carrot cake. I didn’t bother taking a picture before because, well, it was a party and I had other things to do.
For the life of me, I do not understand why anyone would put vegetables in their dessert. Carrot cake sounds about as good to me as pea pudding or turnip torte. Actually, turnip torte has great side-dish potential, I’ll get back to you on that. But carrot cake has never made sense to me. That said, I have now married two men for whom it was their favorite cake. And me being me, I will do my best to make the most delicious version of something that is loved by someone I love. It has taken me years, but I am pretty sure that I just made the most perfect carrot cake on the planet.
Carrot cake typically has a lot of problems for me. People tend to double-down on the nastiness of veggies in your dessert, by adding nuts and raisins and other things that just remind you that you are not eating dessert, but something that was perhaps designed to induce bowel movements in elderly patients who eat too many mashed potatoes. So there’s none of that in my carrot cake. That said, you can add them. If you like those things, they’d probably make this cake even better.
Secondly, all the recipes I found contained “vegetable oil,” which isn’t even a thing. Vegetable Oil is, at best, a frenkenproduct, but it is not a food product. Not in my house anyway. So it took me a while to come up with the right combination of butter and coconut oil to keep it moist, but still fluffy and not dripping with grease.
Lastly, most carrot cakes have, to me, very little taste. They’re just oddly textured, but not committing to any flavor of any sort. Not quite spice cake, not quite white cake, not quite anything.
That said, it still has to be a carrot cake. It’s not like I’d just make some other cake for them and pretend it’s carrot cake. No, the thing that makes this the most perfect is that it’s delicious whether you love carrot cake or hate carrot cake.
Personally, I think that the only reason anyone likes carrot cake is because it has cream cheese frosting, which is easily one of the best things in the known universe, and I would be perfectly happy to be covered in it myself.
Anyway, without further ado, the recipe:
INGREDIENTS
Cake:
1/2 cups granulated sugar 1/2 brown sugar 1/4 cup molasses 1/2 cup coconut oil, melted 1/2 cup butter, melted 5 fresh whole eggs 2 cups pastry flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon 3 teaspoons nutmeg 3 cups raw grated carrots (or more, which kind of makes it salad, so you can eat lots.)
Frosting:
1 stick of butter 2 boxes of cream cheese (I think they’re 8 oz each) 1 bag of powdered sugar (I think they’re 32 oz, but don’t really want to walk downstairs and check.) 1/4 teaspoon of salt (really, you need it to cut the sweet) Vanilla to taste Lemon extract to taste
MAKE IT
Preheat oven to 325.
Grease AND FLOUR your cake pans.
Put sugar, brown sugar, molasses, coconut oil, butter and eggs in a bowl and beat them until they are fully blended and actually getting kind of fluffy.
Sift flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg into a bowl.
Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients mixing as little as possible, but getting them thoroughly mixed.
Once they’re mixed, toss in the carrots and get them evenly distributed.
Bake at 325 until a tooth pick comes out clean.
FROST IT
Put all the ingredients in a mixer bowl and whip the shit out of it for at least 5 minutes. Seriously. Like set a damned clock. 5 minutes is the magic number for perfectly fluffy frosting. You can even make that mortar-like store-bought pastey ass frosting fluffy as a cloud’s tushy by whipping it for 5 minutes.
And there ya go, carrot cake perfection. If you’re one of those people that likes to add nuts to the side, go for it.