Tuesdays with Dorie—Carrot Cake

Carrot cake is a classic, favorite dessert. Dorie’s recipe has some great additions too: coconut, raisins, and nuts. I used walnuts and for fun tried using white carrots in half the batter and orange carrots in the other half.

Homemade versus store-bought


There’s no question that homemade carrot cake is better than store-bought. For one, you can avoid trans fats in homemade versions. Plus, it tastes better. I bought a package of mini carrot cakes from the grocery store to compare, and none of us liked them. They were more spicy and left a chemical after-taste.

White carrots

When I saw white carrots in the store, I knew it would be fun to try in this week’s carrot cake recipe. There are other colored carrots you can buy, such as purple, yellow, or red, but white were the only unusual ones I found before the Tuesday deadline. I found these gems after I'd made the cake and found the darker they are, the sweeter they are.

Since white carrots aren’t as sweet as the orange ones, I thought this would be an interesting balance to the sweetness of the cake and icing.

Garnishes
I crave a “crunchiness” in every dish, so I added a couple of garnishes that would feed this craving.

For one, I made some candied walnuts. I mixed some walnuts with 2 tablespoons of corn syrup, ½ tablespoon maple syrup, and 1 tablespoon sugar. I spread this nut mixture on a Silpat and popped it in a 325ºF oven for 15 minutes. They added a nice crunch on top of the cake or sprinkled around the plate.

I also took an idea from Michel Richard in Happy in the Kitchen, and deep fried julienned carrots. Before deep frying them, I dredged them with cornstarch so that the water in the carrots didn't cause the oil to boil over. After frying, I sprinkled them with icing sugar and used immediately (or as soon as I could get everything plated and ready for the camera!). They don’t retain their crunchiness for long.

Another idea from Michel Richard was to make homemade vanilla ice cream with chunks of carrot cake in it. I took the simple route and used my mixer to stir in carrot cake chunks into store-bought vanilla ice cream. This was a great way to make plain ol’ vanilla ice cream delicious.


Finally, I made a carrot syrup from Michel Richard’s cookbook. Into some sugar syrup that’s turned a caramel color (like the caramel for crème caramel), I added freshly squeezed carrot and orange juice and boiled it down. It had a beautiful, rich color and took Dorie’s simple, but tasty dessert up a notch.

Cool baking pan and other fun stuff
I found this cool baking pan in my research about this recipe.


I also found a cute cartoon about carrot cake at this link.

Recipe


You can find the recipe for Bill's Big Carrot Cake in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. To see how the rest of the TWD group fared with this week's recipe, click here and then click on each blogger!


Tasting Notes
This is a great carrot cake recipe. The addition of coconut and raisins makes it extra special. Soaking the raisins in rum beforehand might be a nice variation for next time.

The white carrots were more popular in the cake than the orange ones. The cake made with the orange carrots was a touch sweeter. Although, I liked the color of the orange carrots in the cake, side-by-side, the white ones win in the tasting category.

This is another keeper recipe from Dorie!

Recipe for Next Week (April 29)
Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake on pages 200-201 chosen by Caitlin of Engineer Baker.