Adventures in Frosting

Adventures in Frosting

We recently celebrated our neighbor's mother's 90th birthday, a party that featured a demonstration of line-dancing by the birthday girl and her dance group. This admirable woman moved in with our neighbors a few years ago and swiftly became the county canasta champion. Mean poker player, too.

My contribution was the birthday cake. I had convinced my neighbor (the birthday girl's daughter-in-law) that store-bought sheet cake can't complete with a real home-baked cake. That meant, of course, that I would have to decorate the cake as well. I thought it would be no problem, but I didn't take into account that the cream-cheese-and-butter frosting for carrot cake is stiffer than most. I managed to blow out not one but two pastry-bag frosting extruders and suffered a little panic as the deadline approached for driving the cake over to the beachfront venue. Nevertheless, it all came out right in the end and tasted wonderful. Another neighbor cooked a killer brisket, and the hostess brought cole slaw, while various sides and hors d'oeuvre showed up with other guests. A fine day.

Here was something funny. A guest exclaimed to me over the moistness of the cake. I was perplexed; this is a perfectly ordinary recipe. I recited the ingredients: carrots, sugar, flour, eggs, oil -- "Oh, oil!" she exclaimed knowingly. "That explains it." I wonder: has she so swallowed the dietary nonsense of recent decades that she's been trying to bake without shortening? Probably with fake sugar and eggs, too. No wonder a real but pedestrian cake recipe tastes like a revelation to her. (She'd probably have died on the spot to hear what the frosting was made of. No icing-whiz? No Splenda?) It's true that carrot cake in a store or restaurant often tastes like rubber iced with snot. Is that the problem? Is it carrot cake by DuPont?

If you don't want to feed the multitudes, the recipe for a more moderate quantity of cake follows. I tripled this to make four 9x13 cakes, which I combined into one 18x26 sheetcake by cutting off their interior sides so they'd fit together snugly. Once they were frosted, you couldn't tell they hadn't all been baked in one pan together.

Carrot Cake

1 lb carrots, grated
2 cups sugar
1-1/2 cups oil (I used canola)
4 eggs
2 cups AP flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup (or more) coarsely chopped pecans
1/2 cup (or more) dried cranberries (or raisins if you prefer it sweeter)

Cream Cheese Frosting (that's "Icing" to y'all up north)

3 packages (8-oz. standard size) of cream cheese
1-1/2 sticks unsalted butter (12 T)
1 tsp vanilla extract
confectioner's sugar to taste (maybe 1/2 cup by my standards, but I like a tart frosting to contrast with the sweet cake)

Preheat oven to 325 F. Combine sugar and oil with a mixer, then beat in the eggs one at a time. In a separate bowl, combine or sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, then mix these dry ingredients into the wet ones. When the flour is well incorporated, stir in the nuts and fruit. Lightly oil the pans (three 9-in cake pans or two bread pans), then lay a sheet of wax paper on the bottom and oil that, too. Bake for about 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Turn out onto oven racks to cool, removing the wax paper carefully.

To make the frosting, let the cream cheese and butter come to room temperature, then combine them with a mixer, add the vanilla, and then add the powdered sugar to taste. Frost the cakes after they have thoroughly cooled. The cakes can keep at room temperature overnight, but the frosting will look best if applied the day you will serve the cake. The frosting should be refrigerated if you make it ahead of time, and it will be easier to stuff it into the frig if it's still in a bowl rather than on a big cake. Bear in mind that the frosting must come to room temperature before it will be easy to work with.