carrot cake

Back when I was baking full time, I had a customer consult me about a dessert to complete a special meal for a houseguest. He explained that the guest was foreign and he wanted to serve him a classic American cake. I made suggestions, and after some deliberation he decided to order a carrot cake. Just before he left, he felt inclined to inform me that the guest was a world-renowned French pastry chef. When he dropped his name, I nearly fainted dead away.

In the ensuing days, I became obsessed with carrot cake. It occupied my every thought. It infiltrated my dreams and became fodder for nightmares.

I knew that I had to hit this one out of the park and that the bakery's recipe that I inherited was not going to cut it. The frosting was easy– it had to be cream cheese and butter, lightly sweetened and brightened with lemon juice. The cake was the crux. I gathered and analyzed every recipe that I could find, looking for the je ne sais quoi that would make it distinct. I made small test batches using various additions of nuts, coconut, pineapple, and even chocolate chips. These, I decided, were perversions and only distracted from what I wanted to achieve: a refined cake with a fine, moist crumb that tasted of sweet, caramelized carrots. It was back to square one.

I started with the basic structure of the cake: fat, starch, sugar, liquid, eggs, leavening, flavoring, and looked at their ratios. While oil (typically used in carrot cake) ensures a moist product, it makes it… well, oily. I opted for the flavor and texture of butter– putting it into the butter cake category where butter, flour, and sugar are used in equal amounts (by weight), liquid makes up about 2/3 and eggs about 1/3. The ratio for a basic butter cake looks like this: 3:butter 3:flour 3:sugar 2:liquid 1:eggs (plus leavening and flavoring). The tweaking of these ratios would be largely dependent on the form of liquid, or moisture used. In a typical carrot cake recipe, some of the moisture comes from the grated carrots as they cook in the batter. Not wanting the coarseness of grated carrots, I tested a recipe using carrot puree, but I didn't like the diluted flavor of the precooked carrots. Freshly extracted carrot juice provided the bright color and flavor that I was after.

After adjusting the ratios to produce a soft, moist cake, I examined the flavor. I dropped the amount of spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger) so that they were a mere whisper in the background. I replaced some of the sugar with brown sugar, then Muscavado (Muscavado has a purer flavor because the molasses isn't removed in processing as it is in brown sugar) in an effort to deepen the flavor. Overall, I was satisfied with the cake, but something kept nagging at me. It was the deep, buttery, caramelized flavor of a fine dark rum that my brain kept referencing. I wished that I could've added caramel without seriously affecting the texture. Then I remembered a 'trick' I used with creme brulee, where the sugar was cooked to a deep amber, allowed to harden, then ground to a fine powder. I simply replaced the sugar in the recipe with this pre-caramelized sugar and I had a superlative cake that I could be proud of, not only because I was confident that it would please a discriminating palate, but also because it was uniquely my own and it pleased me. 

I left that restaurant shortly afterwards and never did get any feedback on the carrot cake. Years later, I read an article in a food magazine that asked international chefs for their favorite American foods. A certain world-renowned French pastry chef was among those interviewed. I think I remember his list containing chocolate chip cookies and key lime pie, but I will never forget that on that list, in black and white, was carrot cake.

Download recipe:   Carrot Cake