This carrot cake by Doni is decorated with finely crumbled carrot cake, reserved from cake trimmings. Doni prefers carrot cakes with “naked” sides, but frosting the entire cake with cream cheese frosting is a baker’s prerogative.
This is a purely anecdotal observation, but I’ve noticed that people who like carrot cake above all other cakes tend to be healthy eaters; the kind of people inclined to run marathons and are dedicated to yoga. Generally speaking these health-conscious folks find chocolate and white cakes too sweet. They’re the same kinds of people who could live easily without sweets, who like poppy-seed and prune cakes, and who think that a cheese course is a bona fide dessert, when we all know it’s really not.
For those people, and anyone who likes carrot cake, I have a recipe that I’ve adapted from my former mother-in-law’s original carrot cake recipe. It’s come a long way over the decades, because I’ve made some changes to produce a better cake. For example, rather than use walnuts I use pecans, since more and more people seem to have walnut allergies. Also, to mitigate carrot cake’s potentially rough texture, I’ve added one game-changer step: I place the nuts, coconut, raisins, and grated carrots in a food processor and pulse a few times to reduce the chunks into manageable tiny bits.
No worries if you don’t have a food processor. A large chef’s knife will do the trick just fine.
I wish I’d figured out the importance of that carrot-cake chopping technique before son Joe and I made my nephew’s wedding cake; before we’d agreed to include a carrot cake tier.
Doni and son Joe created this 5-tier, 27-inch-tall wedding cake.
It’s been nearly a decade since son Joe Domke and I committed to making a five-tier wedding cake for my nephew’s wedding. At the time, Joe was living in the Czech Republic, and I was here in Redding. Over many months we each tried various recipes on our quest to create the perfect wedding cake. We’d compare our findings over phone and video calls. Students in my twin’s art class were the recipients of my test cakes, and were sad when the experiments were done.
I don’t remember the eventual order of the wedding-cake flavors, but they alternated between chocolate, and a classic white wedding cake, all held together with American white buttercream. If I’d had my way, I would have chosen Swiss meringue buttercream, which isn’t as sweet as American buttercream, and it’s super silky smooth. But to be fair, we were concerned about selecting a frosting that was most stable in the event the day turned warm, so American buttercream was the safest choice. The chocolate and white cakes – two classic wedding cake flavors — would have been fairly manageable, but the couple wanted one more cake flavor; carrot.
If I’d known then what I know now, I would have declined to include a carrot cake tier on that wedding cake.
This is probably a good time to mention that although I’ve made tiny wedding cakes since my and Joe’s grand wedding-cake adventure, I’ve never tackled anything as ambitious as my nephew’s five-tier wedding cake, and never will. Been there. Baked that. Learned many lessons, including the fact that wedding cakes are extremely stressful undertakings for basic home bakers.
Doni and son Joe created this 5-tier, 27-inch-tall wedding cake.
Back to the request for carrot cake. In retrospect, we should have compromised, made a large carrot sheet cake, and labeled it a groom’s cake, even though it’s more of a Southern tradition. But if memory serves, the special carrot cake request came from the bride, not the groom. All this is moot, since Joe and I proceeded blindly — naively — with the carrot-cake tier, without considering whether it was a wise wedding-cake choice or not. It wasn’t; a good choice.
The main strike against a including a carrot wedding cake tier — or a layered birthday cake, for that matter — is that it’s chock full of chunky ingredients, like grated carrots, nuts, raisins, pineapple and coconut. These highly textured ingredients make it difficult for a knife to cut cleanly through the cake to deliver a perfect slice. It’s doable, but the slices look like someone tried to cut the cake with a pancake spatula. Major mess!
Which reminds me, because of carrot cakes’ lumpy texture, they make for lousy cupcakes, too, as the cake sticks to the paper liners, leaving behind big carrot-cake hunks.
The good news is that I discovered that all those negative carrot-cake scenarios are successfully mitigated by chopping those chunky ingredients to an even consistency. This one hack makes all the difference between serving messy carrot cake mounds, or presenting slices that would make any baker, bride, or groom very proud.
Try it and see.
Doni and son Joe Domke breathe a sigh of relief that their fiver-tier cake is finished and remained standing. Photo by Shelly Shively. March 2017.
Doni’s Best Carrot Cake
1 pound carrots, finely grated, then rough chopped, either by hand or in the food processor
3/4 cup canned crushed pineapple, well drained (reserve juice)
2 tablespoons finely grated orange peel
2 cups sugar
1 1/3 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
2 ½ cups flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 ½ teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons flour, tossed with the following:
1 cup pecans (or walnuts) chopped
1 cup raisins, rough chopped
1 cup shredded coconut, rough chopped, to avoid long shards of coconut that can resemble dental floss
Combine everything — up to and including the vanilla — into a large bowl. Either in a stand mixer or by hand, slowly add the flour, spices, baking soda and salt to the wet mixture. Blend well.
Toss the nuts, raisins and coconut with the 2 tablespoons of flour, to lightly coat and help prevent the ingredients from sinking to the bottom of the pans. Add those floured ingredients to the batter and gently fold the mixture until everything is combined.
Pour batter into 2 or 3 greased and floured prepared cake pans (depends upon the size), or a 9-by-13-inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees for between 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Note: The length of baking time will depend upon the size of your pan(s) and the batter’s depth. For shallow bakes, check at about the 25 to 30-minute mark.
As the carrot cake bakes, make the frosting (recipe below) and set aside. When in doubt regarding the quantity, double the recipe.
Cool the cake for about 10 minutes before removing from the pan(s) and placing on wire racks. Frost the cake when completely cool.
Cream Cheese Frosting
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
4 tablespoons butter, softened
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons reserved pineapple juice
Mix together the cream cheese, butter and powdered sugar until well blended. Add the vanilla and pineapple juice. Frost the cake.
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