Carrot Cake

For J’s birthday I made him his favorite, carrot cake.  I have a recipe that I always use that is very good but his family has a bunch of people with April birthdays so I needed to make a big cake and I wanted to try a different recipe.  I looked to Martha Stewart and I was not disappointed.

Cake:
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
¾ tsp salt
¼ tsp nutmeg
3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup packed light brown sugar
½ cup sugar
3 eggs
1 tbs vanilla
½ cup water
1 lb carrots (8-10 medium carrots), peeled and shredded on a box grater
1 cup finely chopped pecans plus a handful of pecan halves for decorating

Frosting:
16 oz cream cheese, room temperature
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into pieces and at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla
½ -1 ½ cups powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Butter 2 9-inch round cake pans.

In a medium bowl whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg.  In a large bowl beat butter and sugars with mixer until pale and fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Beat 3 minutes.  Add vanilla, water, and carrots.  Beat until well combined, about 2 minutes.  At this point my batter was pretty well separated as either liquid or butter/sugar and I think that was ok.  Reduce speed to low, add flour mixture, then finely chopped pecans and mix until combined.  Once the flour was added in it looked like normal cake batter again, well maybe more like cookie dough.

Scrape batter into prepared pans, dividing evenly.  This is a somewhat stiff batter so make sure you spread it in the pans evenly because it will bake up exactly how it was poured in the pan.  Bake, rotating pans halfway through, until golden brown and toothpick inserted into centers comes out clean, about 30 minutes.  Let cool in pans on a wire rack for 15 minutes.  Run a knife around edges of cake to loosen then turn cakes out onto rack.  Turn them right side up and allow to cool completely before assembling.

To prepare the frosting beat cream cheese and vanilla until light and creamy, about 2 minutes.  Gradually add the butter and mix on medium speed, beating until incorporated.  If you have butter chunks in the bowl you will have butter chunks when you spread it on the cake, so beat until the butter is combined and make sure it’s not too cold when you start.  Reduce mixer speed to low and gradually add sugar, tasting as you go until desired sweetness.  Martha suggests 2 cups of powdered sugar and I think   that is just crazy talk.  I used about ¾ cup of sugar and I probably could have stopped at ½ cup, but it’s dependent upon your taste for frosting, I like the cream cheese tartness more than the sugar sweetness.

To assemble the cake, trim off the rounded tops if the layers are lopsided.  Place one layer on a serving plate cut side up.  Spread 1 cup of frosting on top of the layer and top with second layer, cut side down.  Cover the top and sides of cake with the remaining frosting, or as much of it as you want, I think it made too much. Decorate the top of the cake with the reserved pecan halves.  Cover the cake and refrigerate until just about time to serve.  Allow to sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes before serving to take the chill off.

This cake was different because most other carrot cake recipes I’ve tried call for oil, not butter.  After refrigerating a stiff cake batter made with butter I was afraid it would be hard and dry, but it wasn’t at all.  I’m not sure that it was quite as moist as my usual recipe, which is a slight alteration of Carrot Cake III on Allrecipes.com, but it was pretty good.  It was very flavorful and had a nice crumb.  My main complaint about this recipe is just that the batter is so stiff so when you put it in the pan you have to actually spread it in evenly, it’s not going to settle evenly.  One of my layers ended up half the size of the other because I had to trim so much off because it rose so lopsidedly.