85. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Date Cooked: July 13, 2009
Page: 835
Rating: A

I feel lately that my stress level has been abating and I am getting excited about cooking from the book again. I haven’t done a lot of baking from the book mostly because it intimidates me so I figured why not try to bake a cake. Carrot cake seemed as good a choice as any since I had some carrots that needed to be used. When I first started gathering the ingredients for this I was expecting it to be difficult but after reading through the recipe this seemed like it would be relatively pain free… I wasn’t really paying attention though.

Starting off I measured out most of the dry ingredients and whisked them together. I then took the bag of carrots I had and ran them through my food processor’s shredding disk. For those that have read my blog from before, I don’t care much for my food processor. It did a poor job of shredding the carrots and I ended up having to pulse them a few times extra to cut up the larger chunks. Once the carrots were processed I tossed them with the dry ingredients. This is where I began to realize what I was getting into. I needed to wash the food processor so I could combine the sugar, eggs and oil. The food processor is a pain in the ass to clean so I tend to avoid it, this was the first of several washings it would need to complete the recipe.

Once the food processor was cleaned I combined the sugar and eggs and then slowly added the oil with the processor on. A nice emulsion formed and once done I folded it into the dry ingredients. Within a few minutes I had a nice batter ready to pour into my prepped baking pan. Into the oven for 40 minutes until a toothpick came out clean. Then it had to cool for 2 hours.

While the cake cooled I set to work cleaning the food processor again to make the icing. The cream cheese icing was as simple as processing all the ingredients in the food processor for less than a minute. I transferred the icing to a bowl and let it chill a little in the fridge until the cake was cool enough for frosting. While waiting I had the opportunity to once again clean the food processor. Really is time for a newer, easier to clean model.

When the cake had finally cooled I spread the icing on (something I am not very talented at). Apparently the cake was not cool enough though and the icing began to get a touch runny so I put it all back in the fridge to chill a little longer before cutting into it to eat!

Rating: A. The cake was very moist and the carrots were very subtle but still noticeable. The cake was lightly spiced and not overly sweet which made the icing all that much better. I definitely enjoyed my piece and had to resist the temptation to help myself to a second, much larger slice.

55. Sour Cream Coffeecake

Date Cooked: January 16, 2009
Page: 838
Rating: A-

I’m woefully behind on posting what I have been cooking so I had better start catching up with some blog posts. The decision for the Sour Cream Coffeecake was simple. I pretty much had all the ingredients and had yet to cook from the Cakes chapter of the Book. So this looked really simple… and I love coffeecake. I originally had intentions of making this a chocolate chip sour cream coffeecake but due to some confusion during the layering of the cake I had completely forgotten that I intended to do that. More on that ridiculous moment shortly.

Since I am not a strong baker I started by getting all of my ingredients out and measured. Then I began to put together the streusel. A base streusel gets made of sugar, flour and cinnamon and then to some of that gets added butter and chopped nuts. The streusel on the cake used the butter and nuts. Once this was done and set aside I began on the batter.

The batter was a straight-forward affair with the usual assortment of cake ingredients with the exception of using the sour cream. Mixing this went smoothly and once done it was time to layer in my greased tube pan.

First in is 2 cups of batter (this works out to about a third but I didn’t notice at first), then a layer of the base streusel, then this is where everything went down the crapper. Had I remember to use the measured out chocolate chips they should have gone just before the streusel, but I was struggling to understand the directions. For some reason I completely missed the portion that told me to put a second layer of batter topped with more streusel before using the rest of the batter. I just skipped to using the rest of the batter. You can see in the picture that there is only one sweet line of sugary goodness and it is close to the bottom. Sure would have been nice to have seen a second line of tasty sweet sugar in there. This of course left me confused as to why I had so much streusel left over until I noticed the error. I probably should not have sampled so much of the streusel while working on this cake. I was probably suffering through a sugar high.

Nevertheless I sent it to bask in the heat of the oven. It took a little longer to bake than the book suggested but my pan is dark and a little on the thick side so it probably slowed the baking process. Once removed and cooled came the most harrowing moment of the ordeal. Flipping it out of the pan. I envisioned the cake sticking while the streusel topping broke and scattered everywhere. Didn’t happen that way. The first flip out of the pan went perfect. The second flip right-side up left bits of streusel topping all over my kitchen, but the majority of the topping remained intact.

Rating: A-. Putting the layering issue aside and the topping being a bit crumblier than I would have liked the flavor and texture of the cake was amazing! It was moist and not overly sweet until you hit the streusel layer. The extra layer of streusel would have been nice but wasn’t really missed. I will be making this again… next time hopefully with chocolate chips.