In honor of Easter and it being my fiance’s favorite type of cake, I baked a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I’ve never baked carrot cake before, mostly because I was never really a fan of it. I had only tried it once before and thought it was too “carrot-y” and dry, but this was actually far from what I remembered – one could barely tell that it contained carrots (trust me, I was grating carrots for what felt like an hour) and was perfectly moist.
If I had one critique, I would say that I would have loved even more cream cheese frosting. The recipe I used from Inspired Taste produced just enough to go in between the layers and on top, but not the sides. The frosting was also on the thin side which made me worry that the top layer of the cake was going to slide off. I would recommend making the frosting on the thicker side or using a different recipe for the frosting. Since we’re not big fans of raisins, I omitted them. Similarly, the pecans are really up to personal preference, something that you can substitute with a different nut or omit altogether – I kept them in, but noticed that they tended to sink to the bottom so you may want to consider preventing that if that matters to you.
As for the decoration, I made the mistake of waiting until the last minute to consider my plan. I ended up doing a quick Google and YouTube search while I was waiting for the cake to cool and saw beautiful pictures of carrot roses (croses?). The most commonly suggested way seemed to be creating the carrot peels using a vegetable peeler and putting them in hot water to make them flexible, but I didn’t want to introduce a raw carrot taste and texture with my cake, so I decided to go the candied route. This seemed to be more for creating curls rather than roses, so I technically combined both methods.
First, I “cooked” the carrot peels from about 3 carrots in a simple syrup (equal parts water and sugar, or in this case, I used 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar) for about 15 minutes. They had an interesting translucent look along the edges, like stained glass. Then, I laid each peel flat on a silicone mat and baked at 225 F for 15 minutes. They were still very sticky when I took them out, but used that to my advantage when forming the roses. Essentially, I took the skinnier, shorter peels and rolled those tight before taking the wider, longer ones to wrap around more loosely and create the “rose” look. I would suggest leaving some minor gaps rather than rolling them up like a rug otherwise they’ll look more like spiraled cylinders than roses. The carrot roses ended up tasting like fondant – it was more sugar than carrot which I guess shouldn’t have been surprising. As a final flourish, I used small mint leaves to give some additional contrast and realism.
Ruth’s Ratings:
Taste: 9/10, you can’t even tell it has carrots in it
Ease of making: 8.5/10 for the cake and frosting (docked for the labor involved with grating the carrots and chopping pecans), 7/10 for the carrot roses (not going to lie, they took awhile to shape)
Note(s) for next time: more and thicker cream cheese frosting, maybe a different decoration for the sake of time
