first attempt | American tourist in New Zealand!

I attempted my first carrot cake last night because my boyfriend Ian wanted one, so it gave me an opportunity to put my apron on and bake up something yummy in the kitchen, I’m always keen for a new baking experience. I took to google to assist me in finding the right recipe, well I got hundreds of results so I didn’t know which one to pick, considering that one website says they have the best cake but scroll down and you’ll find someone else apparently has the best cake so who do I trust?!

I enjoy moist cakes, I think it makes the taste of the cake so much more enjoyable. The second recipe I’ve linked seemed tempting but as I was reading it, I started to get nervous about it being too moist so I went with the first link, also that it was a two layer cake which was what I was after. In her recipe she suggested three cups full of grated carrots, she tried two but it was a disappointment. The saying “less is more” is not suitable for carrot cake, more the carrots the stronger the taste, so don’t skimp on those carrots! She used 1 cup of pecans in her cake, I used just a small handful of crushed walnuts just for a wee bit of a taste in my cake. She put two pans into the oven at the same time, well I only have one pan so I had to take the slow path. I used a typical round pan, and baked at 350F/175C for 20-25 minutes, I checked the cake at 20 minutes and then let it bake just a teeny bit more so it would spring up more when I lightly touched it, making sure it came out dry when poked with a toothpick. Nothing worse than a dry or burnt cake that was meant. Both cakes came out nice and golden and when I flipped them over onto a plate, they just slipped out which was fantastic because it’s no good when the cake crumbles at the bottoms trying to get out of the pan. I used butter and then sprinkled flour on top to make sure I’d have an easy time getting the cakes out, success!!

Now onto the frosting…. as you might have guessed by those three periods, it didn’t turn out great. I’m used to buying Betty Crocker’s premade frosting back at home which I’ve always been plenty content with, but here they only have three flavors none of which were cream cheese frosting so I had to make my own. I tried last year to make cream cheese frosting but it turned out way to runny, and I had a dinner party to finish setting up for so I didn’t have time to play around with an annoying, stubborn wanna-be frosting! I looked up a few frosting recipes but most of them told me the same thing about powdered sugar or confectioner sugar, which I didn’t have either of those, only icing sugar so maybe that was one of my mistakes. I used icing sugar, heavy cream, light cream cheese (for some reason it made me feeling a bit better, like I wasn’t totally killing my diet, but come on, I’m eating cake coated in frosting, ain’t nothing healthy even if it does have carrots and nuts in it!) and a bit of lemon juice since Ian asked for that. I followed the directions but it wasn’t turning fluffy so I let it chill for 45 minutes in the fridge but that didn’t do too much so I added a bit more heavy cream and icing sugar but nothing too different from before so I started to getting bummed out and disappointed. I made such nice cakes and I didn’t want the frosting to be the thing to get in the way! But I couldn’t really figure out a solution so I just went with it and frosted my cake. Since it was a layered cake I put frosting in the middle but since it wasn’t fluffy it couldn’t hold the cake’s weight so when the top layer went on, it just oozed out leaving very little in the middle so that made it a big frustrating mess. I frosted the rest of the cake, decorated the top with crushed walnuts and decided to let it set a bit more over night.

In the morning I checked it out, it seemed out, seemed to sit together a bit better than sliding all over the place. Since it’s Friday today I got a little crazy and had a slice for breakfast, I know, I’m a rebel. It turned out better than I thought, the frosting didn’t really ruin it and since it wasn’t a thick amount of it that was fine by me since I’m not a big fan of frosting. So I’m happy with the cake but I do want to practice making more frosting so my future cakes leave me smiling the whole time. Looks like I’ll be making more baked goods soon, practice makes perfect!