Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/canadas_best_carrot_cake_with_cream_cheese_icing.php
Some of my baking experiments are fueled through my wife's very delicate migraine sensibilities. She's quite sensitive to certain foods and ingredients, so by making something that's all natural ingredients I am able to confidently provide the delicious without exacting a horrible price later on.
That was certainly the reasoning behind the carrot cake. I'm not going to give great detail, yet, on what I have been doing, more illustrate the perils and any alterations that may have occurred along the way to the finish product. Sadly I don't have a great picture of this carrot cake because it looked fantastic.
One thing I did not quite grasp from the outset was the concept of pan greasing and flouring, which is one of those baking terms that everybody expects you to know without actually telling you what it is. Essentially, you grab a blob of butter, softened works really well obviously, and rub it all over the surface of the pan in question. Then take a half cup of flour and shake it over the greased pan surface. Next toss the flour all over the place like you're having a seizure, coat the whole thing, then dump the excess flour out.
My only thing about flouring is that I tend to leave a little too much in the pan, but I can safely say that a little extra here and there will not adversely affect anything coming out of the pan proper in my current experiences.
The recipe was pretty complicated for a first time baker, but going in with a cool head and some assistance from Cassie (my wife) it was very manageable. She was a monster help because she shredded the carrots while I fiddled with the other stuff and helped me work the mixer. Interestingly, this was the only recipe where I actually used our mixer, everything else has been stirred by hand.
This carrot cake recipe wins, hands down, versus most others I found because the others had raisins in them. I don't mind a raisin but they do not belong in my baked goods. They are like lazy man's sugar to me and if you are pro-raisin I do not mind telling you right now that this blog will disappoint, shock, dismay, and otherwise not acknowledge your stance.
As I recall, the cake was in for the whole 40 minutes, though I did check it 5 minutes ahead of schedule just to make sure it was good. It definitely needed the full 40 to cook, which was fine since I made the icing in the meantime. You could easily shave some time off by buying your own icing but prepared icing is chock full of chemicals and since I'm trying to stay natural here it was homemade or bust. Besides that, the homemade was amazing and it was really, really simple to bake.
So that was the end of my first foray into baking. Tune in next time when I start having actual pictures of the nonsense cookery I'm embarking on.
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