Hands down, carrot cake is one of my all time favourites. It boasts a wonderful array of flavours and textures and, unlike many icings and butter creams which often overwhelm sponges with sweetness, carrot cake's cream cheese filling and topping is as good as it gets for me. Given my love for this classic, I need very little motivation to make one and, with it being National Carrot Day earlier this week, I quickly found myself in the kitchen.
Wanting to try a slightly different recipe, a quick Google turned up an excellent article on The Guardian's website detailing what they thought constituted the perfect carrot cake and why. Boasting tried-and-tested flavours I was pleased to see their recipe didn't get lost in chefy elaborations. Moreover, I was interested in the fact that it switched in butter for the often heavily prescribed glugs of vegetable oil. Indeed, anything that gives me an excuse to advocate for the use of butter, a wonderful, but tragically maligned, fat choice, is a very good thing in my book.
Anyway, I went ahead with the recipe keen to see if it could live up to its title. I must say I did make a couple adjustments by exchanging wholemeal self-raising flour for white (I find wholemeal too heavy in cakes), adding in more spice and slightly upping the lemon zest content of the icing.
That aside, the method was quite straightforward with one only having to be careful over folding in the dry ingredients so air wasn't overly knocked out. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough cream cheese mixture but the recipe ended up judging it perfectly as the mixture had a lot of flavour meaning only a relatively light spreading was needed.
That aside, the method was quite straightforward with one only having to be careful over folding in the dry ingredients so air wasn't overly knocked out. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough cream cheese mixture but the recipe ended up judging it perfectly as the mixture had a lot of flavour meaning only a relatively light spreading was needed.
The resulting cake looked good with a cross section revealing a nice sponge studded with sultanas, pecans and grated carrot. As for the taste, well, nothing is 'perfect', but this was probably the best carrot cake I've ye to taste. The sponges were jam-jacked with the flavour and textures courtesy of the spices, savoury pecans, juicy sultanas and tangy orange peel. Whilst that cream cheese filling and topping stole the show for me as zingy lemon offset the slightly sweet creaminess beautifully. All in all, this carrot cake was an absolute joy and I thoroughly recommend it.
RECIPE
See here.
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