My mom remarried when I was in my 30s. Already on my path as a food professional, I decided to make her wedding cake. Or wedding cakes.
I didn’t want to risk a tiered extravaganza caving in on itself or looking like a leaning tower. So I decided to bake half a dozen 9-inch round cakes and dress them with bougainvillea blooms loosely arranged like flowing floral halos over and around each one. There was never any question about what kind of cakes to make: carrot cake with orange cream cheese frosting.
Carrot cake is an oil-based, one-bowl quick bread of a cake moistened with grated carrots, redolent of sweet spices and always slathered with cream cheese frosting — the only question is, how much?
Recipes from the 1970s generally called for roughly one cup of grated carrots per cup of flour. Over the decades, the amount of carrots in many recipes has crept up to two cups per cup of flour and most recently as much as three cups. Oddly, no matter how many carrots you add, carrot cake tastes nothing like carrots but has a flavor profile all its own.
What the extra carrots do accomplish is to make the cake more moist, darker and earthier. For me, there’s nothing more disappointing in a carrot cake than one that is light-colored and airy like, well, cake with flecks of carrots in it. Carrot cake should be moist but not oily. Dense but not fudgy. Loaded with nuts. (I prefer walnuts over pecans, but you do your thing. Just make sure to toast them before adding them to the batter.)
Cream cheese frosting gets the citrus-y treatment with a little bit of fresh-squeezed orange juice and finely grated orange zest. Add toasted nuts if you like.
(Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)
I also go big on spices — cinnamon, clove, allspice (nutmeg, if you’re so inclined) and vanilla. And I add grated fresh ginger, because a good carrot cake has a gingerbread quality to it. (I don’t care for raisins in my carrot cake, but carrot cake is forgiving; if you want to add raisins, it’s a free world.)
Where, when or by whom carrot cake was invented is unknown. We take the idea of carrots in a cake for granted, but think about it: Somewhere in the world (I like to think it was Berkeley), in some place in time (evidence suggests it was the 1970s), there was a human being who decided to put grated carrots in cake batter!
People — cooks and chefs and bakers even — have achieved icon status for less. Jean-Georges Vongerichten underbaked chocolate cake, giving birth to molten chocolate (“lava”) cake. Wolfgang Puck put smoked salmon on pizza (because he reportedly ran out of bread for Joan Collins, who wanted smoked salmon).
Writer Carolynn Carreño whips up her cream cheese frosting, made with fresh orange juice and orange zest. (Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)
But carrots, raw carrots, in cake. Why this person didn’t get their due seems unjust, but maybe it’s because they were an anonymous health-nut hippie, in which case they wouldn’t care about such a worldly thing as fame. Whoever invented it, the health craze of the 1970s put carrot cake on the national menu, and that is certainly how it came to play such a prominent role in my life.
My mom was too glamorous in her flared jeans and silk shirts to be considered a hippie — though she did drive a van with a mural painted on the outside and carpeting and furniture inside. But she was a self-proclaimed “health nut.” The only bread we were allowed to eat was Oroweat Honey Wheat Berry, because it was brown and contained visible seeds and grains. And the only cereals permitted were All-Bran and Quaker 100% Natural, a.k.a. “granola.” Except for decorated sheet cakes from the local bakery she ordered for our birthdays, the only cake she ever baked was, you guessed it: carrot cake.
My mom’s version, the recipe for which she clipped from a newspaper that was so oil-soaked it became transparent, was a burnished shade of brown that evoked something substantial, mysterious — and maybe even healthy with frosting made of cream cheese whipped up with powdered sugar and a hint of orange juice — no butter involved. A true California cake if ever there was one.
I made that carrot cake throughout my childhood. I baked them, frosted them and served them from a 9-by-11-inch Pyrex dish. (I had no idea how to turn a cake out of a pan, or that I was even supposed to.) For holidays, I made a mess of cream cheese frosting dyed with too much food coloring to decorate the tops with a holiday motif. My American flag for the Fourth of July was so smeared and sloppy that my attempt at patriotism could have been a felony.
(Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)
This year, inspired by the beautiful carrots at the farmers market, springtime and my mom, whose 87th birthday is April 21 (Happy Birthday, Mom!), I decided to revisit carrot cake.
I referenced my mom’s old recipe, long ago transferred to grease-stained index cards; two of Nancy Silverton’s (I co-wrote her five most recent books); and two more — one from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and another from King Arthur Flour’s website. And I made cakes. That’s when I realized all these cakes had very similar proportions of one cup of flour, one cup of sugar and two eggs for each layer of a cake. The carrots, as I mentioned, have increased three-fold. I tweaked and blended and brought several versions along with a selection of cream cheese frostings to my morning coffee klatch to get feedback, until I landed on my ideal.
“They’re all very Moosewood,” my friend Allen said, after sampling his seventh square of carrot cake at the klatch. (If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that people love to be asked their opinion as much as they love free cake for breakfast.)
By Moosewood, Allen was referring to the “Moosewood Cookbook,” a groundbreaking vegetarian cookbook that came out of the Moosewood worker-owned collective in Ithaca, N.Y., in the 1970s and evokes a certain back-to-the-land, communal-living vibe. By “very Moosewood,” we both understood that he meant the cake was unrefined, perhaps even aspiring to be healthy.
“Carrot cake is supposed to be Moosewood,” I said. “For all we know, Moosewood invented carrot cake.”
Unfortunately, we will likely never know who invented carrot cake. But no matter, because carrot cake continues to be reinvented. It is the people’s cake. A peaceful warrior. Its tolerance for self-expression is part of the appeal of carrot cake.
Switch up the nuts. Add a big handful of dried fruit. Go ahead, add canned pineapple or a cupful of applesauce if you must. (I never do.) Throw in some desiccated coconut or a few gratings of lemon or orange zest. Use whole wheat flour in place of white flour, or olive oil in place of vegetable oil, and nothing bad is going to happen. (I barely notice a difference with either one.) Some bakers these days even replace the carrots with parsnips, butternut squash, rutabaga or sweet potatoes.
Far out, I know.
