Oh Carrot Where Art Thou?

I have been craving carrot cake since last summer. I have no idea why I haven’t gotten around to making one except that I always seem to baking for someone else. I adore carrot cake, moist, flavorful and another culinary excuse to have cream cheese frosting. I haven’t made carrot cake in years and for the life of me couldn’t remember my recipe so I set out with my trusty laptop to find one. Every single recipe I found contained massive amounts of white sugar, loads of oil and very little or worse yet, no actual carrot at all (baby food? Really? I didn’t even like that stuff when I was a baby, well except for blueberry buckle but that’s another story for another time). I found there are two extremes when it comes to carrot cake, uber-healthy or sugar laden and not much in between and none of it screamed decadent holiday dessert to me. I even consulted The Cake Bible I received as a birthday gift and to my utter disappointment, found Rose’s recipe using whole wheat flour to be lacking for my purposes. So the challenge had been set, I needed to put together an actual carrot cake that would make my tummy sing.

Many of the recipes I looked at were not actual carrot cakes, they were quick breads or muffins with a little bit of carrot and a ton of sugar baked in a cake pan and frosted with cream cheese icing. Carrots are naturally sweet and masking them under piles of sugar seemed wrong to me. Also, if I wanted carrot bread I would just make carrot bread. I wanted cake. Too many of the recipes called for extended mixing times AFTER the flour had been added. Hello! I want cake, not bread and over mixing causes gluten production, which makes bread.

So I started with what I knew… I knew I wanted carrot to be the star player and not merely an add-in. I knew I wanted walnuts but no raisins or coconut. I knew I didn’t want to taste vegetable oil or end up with a heavy brick that sat in my stomach hours after consuming it. I knew I wanted it moist, flavorful and decadent just like my Gram used to make. The last thing I should mention is that I ultimately decided on cupcakes instead of a 9x13 or layer cake. Why? Just cuz, that’s why. I gathered my ingredients and hit the kitchen…

You’ll notice a few things different about my version of carrot cake, most notably (I think) the absence of vanilla and a significant reduction in sugar and oil. I love vanilla. Vanilla is my friend. Vanilla has no place in this cake. Vanilla would be wasted in this cake. The cinnamon and ginger are such strong players that they would completely swallow 1 or 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Save the vanilla for the frosting. There is no white sugar in this cake. The frosting has more than enough white sugar in it to satisfy the sweetest of sweet-toothed people. I used a combination of brown sugar and unsweetened, crushed pineapple and its juice to sweeten the cake. I swapped out most of the oil for plain yogurt. Lastly, I used salted butter because that’s what most people have on hand. What did all of this produce? Actual cake. Carrot cake where you could see the carrots, walnuts and pineapple in the finished product. Cake that feels like cake in your mouth not bread. Cake that is savory and slightly sweet and yummy and a perfect vehicle for cream cheese frosting!

Carrot Cake

2 c Walnut halves and pieces or halves, your choice, toasted, cooled and chopped to size
1 lb of carrots, peeled and grated
2 ½ c AP flour, I prefer King Arthur
½ t salt
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
2 t cinnamon
½ t freshly rasped ginger (use 1 t if powdered)
¾ c brown sugar
½ c melted salted butter
¾ c + 2 T plain yogurt
3 eggs
8 oz crushed, unsweetened pineapple in juice, drained- reserve juice
2 T of the reserved pineapple juice
1 recipe Creamy Cheesy Cream Cheese Frosting
Pulverized, toasted walnuts for garnish optional

I started by toasting walnuts and yes, it’s worth the extra step. I had a one-pound bag of walnut halves and pieces. I toasted half of the bag on an un-greased cookie sheet in a 350* oven for 10 minutes while I peeled and grated a pound of carrots on the larger side of my box grater (yes it matters, the smaller side turns them to mush). I ran my knife through the walnuts to make them the size I wanted, which is to say in small chunks.

In a large bowl whisk together the: flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and ginger. Using your hands, toss the carrots and nuts into this mixture. You really need to do this part with your hands to ensure that everything is evenly distributed and the carrots are well coated with the flour. By tossing the ingredients at this stage, you don’t end up developing gluten by over mixing once the wet ingredients are added.

In a separate bowl beat together the oil, yogurt and sugar until smooth and no traces of sugar remain. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the pineapple. Pour this mixture over the flour and stir just until combined. I found my mixture to be a little too thick at this point and added 2 T of the reserved pineapple juice.

I used my handy-dandy ice cream scoop to portion out the cupcakes (this recipe made 2 ½ dozen). Bake at 350* for 18 minutes, allow them to cool in the pan for a few minutes before removing them to a wire rack to cool completely. You could easily bake this in any cake pan you wish.

Creamy Cheesy Frosting*

8 oz cream cheese, room temp.
1 stick of salted butter, room temp
1 lb box Confectioner’s/10x sugar
2 t vanilla extract
1 t lemon juice

I start by creaming the cream cheese and butter together in my kitchen aid. Once they are mixed and smooth I add the sugar and flavorings. I start on the "Stir" setting so I don't get covered in powdered sugar and then kick it up to 8 and let it go for 5 minutes. Too thick? Add about a tablespoon of milk. Too thin? Pop it in the fridge a bit and it will firm up.

I used a Wilton tip for the frosting swirls and toasted, pulverized walnuts to finish them off. There are a few tips I can give you that I find help me immensely. Before I start frosting I divide the cupcakes into 2 pans that are sturdy enough to be able to carry over to the fridge. When using tips to frost I find that in addition to the soft consistency of the frosting, holding the tip directly over the cupcake and NOT at any kind of angle gave me the best look. I frosted 4 at a time and then stopped to pat on the walnuts. When one pan was done it immediately went into the fridge to firm up. Firming up the frosting BEFORE transporting is the key to your cupcakes arriving as beautiful as they were freshly frosted in your kitchen.

*Squirrely wrath!

Boo-ter-fly Cakes

Sometimes I get myself in over my head without even trying. Such was the case with these adorable little cakes made for our little friend Boo. Exactly 7 days before her party her mother and I went over to the bookstore so I could show her Hello, Cupcake! to see if there was anything in there she liked. To my honest shock and surprise there was nothing in the book that tickled her fancy so we moved on to other books, fancier books, more complicated cakes. In the end we settled on a combination of the butterfly cupcakes from Hello, Cupcake! (with modifications) and a mini-cake from Mich Turner's book Spectacular Cakes. While the cakes would be labor intensive they weren't really all that complicated, especially if I started them three or four days before they were needed for the party. What I didn't count on was an entire week of whatever could go wrong, would go wrong (including me getting a migraine that just wouldn't quit).

The plan was that the mini cakes would be french vanilla, filled with soft pink buttercream, covered in poured fondant of pale green, striped with thin lines of pale pink and magenta buttercream and topped with a pastel colored butterfly. They needed 36 little cakes for their party. In order to ensure that I would have enough I decided to go with cupcakes thinking I would use a timbale mold/cutter to make them all uniform. Due to time constraints, I used french vanilla cake mix that I doctored up with a box of instant pudding and some vanilla extract. The cakes were soft and dense and yummy! However the timbale mold/cutter I bought was 1 size too big and I was unable to make them all completely uniform. Not a problem for cupcakes but for sure a problem when you're going to be coating them with poured fondant. Next time I will make sheet cakes and cut the cakes out to ensure uniform cylinders and save myself the headache when it comes time to coat them. The cakes looked like little light green Ring Dings (or Ding Dongs depending on where you grew up) but tasted amazing!

I used my go-to vanilla buttercream for the filling and butterfly bodies. Man I love that stuff ... it's just everything you want and need a buttercream to be. The pourable fondant however was a COMPLETE disaster! I used the recipe on the King Arthur website. Now, before I go on, I want to remind you guys of my love affair with King Arthur flour. To be fair, it's not that their recipe was a complete disaster, it was a comedy of errors and miscalculations and a migraine that set the whole thing on the road to horrible. We ended up having to scrap the Mich Turner like stripes we had planned on piping onto each cake pre-butterfly because we ran out of time and patience with this project. In the end I don't think it made that much of a difference to anyone but the two of us. Both child and mom were thrilled with the cakes and really that's all that mattered!

I had a little accident in the kitchen and I lost 1/2 a pot of liquid fondant to my kitchen floor. I also thought the original coating looked like, well, snot. It was light green and shiny and definitely had an "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew" factor. In the end I had to remake the fondant and add a can of ready made frosting to make it opaque (which turned out really well for my purposes) but not before I ended up with a sugar burn on the fingers of my right hand. I used a glass bowl over a pot of simmering water for the second batch and it makes the whole process so much easier as you can regulate the temp as you go. Also, the second time around we chilled and dipped the cakes instead of pouring them. I highly recommend using the dipping method! However, my partner in culinary crimes ended up with sugar burns on his palm when one of the cakes got away from him and instead of letting it fall to the floor he tried to be a hero and save it mid-fall only to have it land top down in his palm. This is not a project to try with the kids in case anyone was wondering. That being said, I have it on good authority that the cakes were a big hit with kids and kids at heart alike! Although, the kids weren't sure what to do with the wings and had to be told they could eat them!

The butterflies were the easiest part of all this and made using Merckens Rainbow Wafer Coatings (in white, pink, purple, blue, peach, yellow and light green) and a hand drawn pattern that eventually was only used as a guide. Once again my creative partner saw potential to put his own stamp on something already pretty cool and he made the wings more monarch-like by free-handing a wing extension. There are detailed directions in Hello, Cupcake! but you really don't need them (buy the book anyway, it really is cool). Just melt some coating or chocolate, draw a butterfly and fill it with a second color of coating or chocolate and then swirl. You should also know that we had to custom blend the Merckens to get these shades by mixing them with white. There are a few tricks and tips, enough so that they will be their own post in the near future.

Assembly was easy and went pretty quick. Just make sure you are not working in a hot kitchen or the wings will get too soft and give you issues. We placed each cake in a pastel cupcake liner, piped on the body and stuck the wings in place. They all sat in the fridge for almost 2 hours pre-transport to make sure the buttercream and fondant were really hard to minimize the potential for transport disaster. I made a cake taker out of a heavy duty plastic soda case topped with a cookie sheet that sat on the edge of the case and wrapped the whole thing in plastic. It worked like a charm and fit in a fridge perfectly! For display at the party I lent them my wire cupcake holder and a silver platter. With a few pretty cupcake papers and some doilies it made for a really neat display! I may try these again at some point, the original version as they were supposed to be .... maybe not. I am such a huge fan of petit fours and to me this was a great updated version of a classic little cake that time has forgotten. Hopefully next time there won't be so much other stuff going on, I won't have a migraine and they will come out as anticipated!

Hello, Cupcake! A Review and Project Test

Our little friend Emmy had a birthday this past week and it was her wish that she get a crocodile cake for her big party. As it turned out the book Hello, Cupcake! (by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson), which I've been wanted to check out for a while now, had instructions on how to make such a marvelous creature. As you can see we (we being myself and my wonderful, never used a piping bag before partner in confectionery crime) were able to turn out an end product that look pretty close to the photo in the book!

Hello, Cupcake! is an excellent resource for any baker's personal library and well worth the modest price tag! The bigger bonus is that you honestly do not need baking, cooking or decorator skills or any special equipment to turn out end products that look like the creations from the book. While I disagree with the authors on both the subject of cake and frosting (which I'll get to in a minute), I couldn't help but get lost in all the wonderful photographs and easy to follow directions. The cookies and candies that make up each project are readily available at more than one retail outlet in my area. In fact the only things I was unable to find for my project were white cupcake liners (my supplier was out) and green jelly beans (because I was unwilling to pay $4.50 for a bag when I only needed 2 beans).

"Old Swampy" as we made him consisted of 12 Chocolate Buttermilk cupcakes and 12 Buttermilk French Vanilla cupcakes tinted pink (to please the Birthday Girl) with Wilton "Rose" colored gel. He is frosted in homemade vanilla buttercream tinted with a mixture of Wilton "Leaf Green" and "Brown" gel tints. I followed the cake instructions in the back of Hello, Cupcake! and was very disappointed with the cakes themselves finding them a bit dry, bland in flavor and not at all as solid as the book suggests they will be. For future Hello, Cupcake! projects I will be sticking with my own tried and true cake recipes that have stood the test of time as being moist, dense and full of flavor. Hello, Cupcake! also claims that canned frosting works best for their projects however my own vanilla buttercream frosting pipes well and when refrigerated holds its shape even in the heat of an outdoor party (unlike canned frosting which gets drippy when it gets too warm)!

One of the other benefits of using my homemade frosting is that you can make up to 2 days before you plan on eating the end product and it actually improves the flavor! It's super easy to make and lends itself to an infinite variety of flavor possibilities!

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

1 stick room temperature salted butter
2 1/2 C confectioner's sugar
2 t milk + a little more
1 t vanilla
1 t freshly squeezed lemon juice

Put all of the ingredients in a bowl and mix on low until blended then kick it up to high and let it go for 3 minutes adding more milk if necessary for thinning. Store in an airtight container for up to 48 hours prior to use. Holds well in the fridge for the life of the finished cake product (they never seem to be around for more than a few days here!)

Cupcakes Are The New Black

It's no secret that cupcakes are hot right now, in fact they have been elevated from a tasty bakery treat to fashion icon. I can't turn my head these days without seeing them on t-shirts, purses, jewelry and even sneakers (man I gotta get me some of those!) But the things I like best about cupcakes are their simplicity and infinite adaptability from afternoon treat to elegant dessert. These are Tye Dye cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream frosting made or a high school graduation BBQ. I wish I could take the credit for inventing such a clever idea but it was Saucy over at bloggedy blog blog who posted about them and where I got the idea.

While I make a ton of stuff from scratch there are times when I need to cut corners and when it's okay to cut corners and cake is one of those things it's okay to use a mix for AS LONG as you use a good cake mix. I only use Duncan Hines. I've tried other brands available at the grocery store and almost every single time I consider the end product to be nothing short of a disaster. Duncan Hines has perfected the cake mix and while I only use their basic flavors* (Chocolate, Devil's Food, Yellow, Marble and White) they make an excellent jumping off point. No matter what kind of pan I bake the batter in I always mix it the same way (except for the white cake mix) box of mix, regular size box of instant pudding in the corresponding flavor, 4 large eggs, 1 C water and 1/3 C melted butter. I put everything in my Kitchen Aid bowl with the paddle attachment, start on "Stir" until blended and then let it go for 2 full minutes on 5 or 6. The batter will increase in volume, thicken and lighten in color if mixed properly. It's important that you follow the mixing directions as it directly contributes to your finished product.

For these particular cupcakes I mixed the White cake mix exactly as the directions said to. I removed 2 cups of the batter and tinted it using Wilton Icing Color (gel formula) in Violet. As you can see it looks pretty dark but when I pulled the cupcakes from the oven they looked pale. If this happens to you DON'T PANIC, they darken up just fine when they cool! I used an ice cream scoop (the same one I always use for cupcakes it holds a little over 2T of batter) and two tablespoons to layer the batter into the silver cupcake liners. I'm not even gonna try to fib here, it was a giant, messy pain to do this! Next time I will simply plop the colored batter on top and use a knife to swirl the same way I do when making a marble cake.

Aren't they cute? They smelled awesome too! IMHO, a cupcake is only as good as its frosting and canned frosting, while it has its uses (DH Cream Cheese Frosting is what I use on my cinnamon rolls because at that hour of the morning there is no way I'm making homemade frosting), just doesn't cut it for me anymore. I am not a cake decorator by any means and I used to get really frustrated because I couldn't make my cupcakes look as awesome as others seemed to be able to do so easily. I learned that they key to the beautiful swirls was the consistency of the frosting. The softer the frosting, the more luscious looking the swirl! In fact, the frosting should be so soft that you fear it melting right off the cupcake.

Vanilla Buttercream

2 sticks unsalted, room temperature butter (really soft but not melted is the key)
2t vanilla
1 t lemon juice
4 C 10x sugar
1/4 t salt
milk to thin

I throw everything in my Kitchen Aid at one time, start on "Stir" so I don't get covered in powdered sugar and then kick it up to 8 and let it go for 5 minutes. If it's too thick I add about a tablespoon of milk. I used a Wilton 1M tip for the frosting swirls and Wilton Pearlized Sugar Sprinkles and Wilton Heart Drops to finish them up. There are a few tips I can give you that I find help me immensely. Before I start frosting I divide the cupcakes into 2 pans that are sturdy enough to be able to carry over to the fridge. When using the 1M tip I found that in addition to the soft consistency of the frosting, holding the tip directly over the cupcake and NOT at any kind of angle gave me the best look. I frosted 4 at a time, sprinkling the sugar and adding the Heart Drops as I went. When one pan was done it immediately went into the fridge to firm up. Firming up the frosting BEFORE transporting is the key to your cupcakes arriving as beautiful as they were freshly frosted in your kitchen.


*I do not use and will never use a mix for things like Carrot Cake, Strawberry Cake, etc. If I am going to make a fruit or vegetable cake I want to use fresh fruit and veggies.