So I was telling my friend, Jean, that I don’t like vegetables in cake; least of all, carrots. She says, “I LOVE carrot cake. LOOOOOOOOVE carrot cake…with cream cheese frosting….YUM!”
Fine. I’ll make carrot cake. On Saturday.
Found a recipe for “the BEST carrot cake” which, to me, is like the BEST coffee or the BEST bacon-wrapped anything.
I grated up two enormous carrots into a bowl before I started anything else.
I followed the very simple instructions of mixing all the dry stuff together and then all the wet and sugary stuff together, then gently mixed everything together and dumped it into a 9 x 13 pan. The directions suggest two 9″ rounds, but I wanted something that was going to be easier to transport to a restaurant, so I went with the rectangle.
I had to bake it quite a bit longer for it to get cooked in the middle (a problem I’ve been having a lot lately, just having stuff be raw in the middle…I wonder if the oven isn’t getting hot enough? I’ll have to get one of those oven thermometers to see.)
I pulled it out of the oven when the toothpick came out clean and let it cool for a long time. Since I was leaving it in the pan, it needed extra time to fully cool before putting the frosting on.
Cream cheese frosting really is the easiest thing to make. One 8-oz brick of cream cheese, one stick of softened butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. That’s it. Put cheese in the upright mixer with the paddle thing and run it for a minute. Then put in the stick of butter and let it run for a bit. Then put the sugar in (slowly or you’ll have a sugary mushroom cloud), and then a splash of vanilla. Bam. That’s it!
I put the frosting into a piping bag with the intention of having cute little peaks all over, but there wasn’t enough frosting to go on that thick, so I got out a scraper and smoothed it out.
I’ll have to let you know how people think it tastes. I know what I think…
Edit: met up with my favorite weirdos and the decision was unanimous…10/10! (Except for Sparky, who wrote down 11.)
Edit again: The middle kid tried it and declared it, “OK.” Not a carrot cake fan.