Sometimes I think I’m the most peculiar homemaker that ever lived. Take today’s carrot cake recipe. It all started because I had one lonely can of cake frosting in the pantry that I wanted to use up. My husband does the food shopping each week, mostly because he hates the way I do the shopping and his mother, God rest her soul, was the epitome of the frugal housewife. She taught him well, and our pantry is usually full of good-to-eat things found at bargain prices. He likes to watch shows like Extreme Couponing, and he can figure out the price per ounce for rice and pasta in his head while I stand there and say things like, “That package is pretty; I think I’ll buy that.”
Anyway, back to the frosting and why a carrot cake emerged from my oven last Sunday. It started with my frenzy of cleaning the pantry a few weeks ago. I got sick of rooting around in flour-dusted shelves for the last bag of semi sweet chocolate morsels, or not finding any kidney beans on the night when I wanted to make chili. So I spent an entire Saturday morning cleaning out the pantry. I took everything off of the shelves, threw out questionable products, scrubbed the shelves and re-organized the foods. That’s when I realized that we had several boxes of yellow cake mix and one can of cream cheese frosting.
What the heck do you do with cream cheese frosting? “Carrot cake,” hubby told me.
Great, but we didn’t have a mix. He likes cakes from mixes. He does not like my ‘from scratch’ baked products. Now before you either think I’m a lousy cook or he has no taste, let me remind you that he grew up with a father who sold a commercial brand of cookies for a living; he dined on the finest name-brand products, and his mother didn’t like baking. I, on the other hand, grew up with a mother who baked a lot from scratch while she was well and a sister who took over the cooking duties with a flourish when Mom became ill. Home-baked goods in my family of origin were praised; baking the cherished family recipe for bread pudding or Gunkelhopft, a buttery German pound cake, was a rite of passage.
You present me with a can of cream cheese frosting with an expiration date looming, and out comes the cook book and the carrots. Time to bake a carrot cake.
Hunting for the Perfect Carrot Cake Recipe
My cookbooks yielded recipes with oddball ingredients or promises of “dry, crumbling cake.” Who wants a dry cake? I wanted a recipe that would taste like the Betty Crocker mix my hubby likes. Smart old me, I turned to, guess what? The Betty Crocker site. And yes, this is the recipe that I used!
I mad the recipe using two 8″ round cake pans. The cake came out easily from the pans, but didn’t rise much, which worried me a bit. Not to worry….
I used my food processor to shred the carrots. Five medium carrots was too much, but I think I used five large ones instead. That’s how I ended up with the Carrot Coleslaw recipe I shared on Wednesday – too many extra shredded carrots! Well, both recipes were good, so my over enthusiastic carrot shredding just ended up being “two” tasty!
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