Carrot Cake, or Carrot Pudding?

Hello, crafty and sundry!

Here in the UK, it’s cheapier and easier to have groceries delivered rather than to spend the petrol to go to the store. Because of that, we’ve been getting our groceries delivered for some time. The husband still has to spend nearly as long doing the online order, but at least he can do that from the comfort of the couch rather than being shouted at by an exuberant four and a half year old in the aisles. Well okay, she still shouts at him here, but moving on.

In the last order, he had asked for a bag of potatoes to replenish our supplies. I’d gone on a spate of making potato soup, so I’d used up most of what we had (worth it!). Instead, they brought a bag of carrots. We didn’t need a bag of carrots; we had more than enough for meals already in stock. So what do you do when God Tesco gives you lemons carrots? Why, you make carrot cake, of course.

My big girl had been telling us for weeks how much she liked carrot cake, so that had been some inspiration as well. I honestly can’t remember when last she had it, but she loves her dairy and a cream cheese frosting is bliss to her. Well, to all of us, let’s be honest. Whenever she would have, it would not have been something I’d made, as the last time I’d made a carrot cake was probably six years ago or so. I couldn’t remember if I had a recipe or not, so I started poking around online to see what I could find.

After pawing through many that tried to insist on weird things like pineapple and raisins (!!!), I settled on trying this one:

Moist Carrot Cake Recipe
http://www.chow.com/recipes/21792-moist-carrot-cake-recipe/

At least it baked up solid?

First of all, I’m wondering if my conversion from cups to grams was wrong, because it was a lot a lot of carrot. Translating between US and UK measurements can be a bit awkward, and while I could have shredded carrots and shoved it into my cup measurer, I was trying to come up with something a bit more… metric. Somehow I came up with 710ml, which I can sort of ghetto match because of my electronic scale. I’m thinking it should have been something more like 150 grams, so whups. I think that if I do make this recipe again, I will use a lot less carrot, because as tasty as it is, it’s more like a cake-shaped pudding than anything. Googling around backs that up, and suggests that 390 grams would have been closer to right. Will definitely keep that in mind…

Another thing was that the recipe specifically called for one to use the biggest section of the grater. It was my understanding that smaller was better, but I do tend to prefer to follow the instructions as closely as possible the first time through. I don’t think this was particularly a problem, and while I cannot remember if I did a finer or a coarser grate on my first carrot cake all those years ago, you could really taste the carrot this time around. But that might have also been because I used like, twice the carrot I should have.

I’d say the recipe is pretty good though, and that I’m going to have to give it another shot. It’s disappearing at a fair pace, so I can’t complain overmuch. Next time I make the icing though, I’m going to use more icing sugar. While it was perfectly delicious, it was a bit too runny for my tastes. I like it to stay where I put it, you know? Well, and I miiiight have a bit of a sweet tooth. Maybe. *whistles*

<3