I was worried about how to get "finely grated" carrots, thinking at first a zester would be in order. Lila pointed out that was probably *too* fine, and that zesting a carrot would take forever. When I was setting out ingredients, I had the fortune to look over the little blurb at the top of the recipe, where it recommended that the shredding blade on a food processor was a good way to grate carrots. And I have recently re-discovered that I actually OWN a food processor, have for years, just haven't used it yet. Boy-howdy, it is fast. The carrots were shredded in less time than it took us to figure out how to assemble the parts to make the blade work. The one problem with the processor (and this may entirely be that we somehow assembled it incorrectly, but magically in a way that still functioned) is that the grated carrots didn't seem to want to come out of the processor. Rather they preferred to hang out between the blade and the other piece we had in there. Once I realized this, I was able to fish out the carrots that stuck.
It was like carrot confetti in my kitchen for a while. And, even though I had already made two of the recipes, I finally christened my newest cookbook. A faintly orange spot now graces the carrot cake page. Using a half-cup measure to get to 1 and 1/2 cups, I realized I didn't know if carrots counted as a dry or a liquid. I also realized that grating them by hand would have made for less densely packed shredded carrots, and a kitchen scale has joined the ranks of things I desire for my kitchen (the recipe was kind enough to tell me 150 grams of carrots, if I'd had any way to measure that). As it stands, our cake may have ended up extra-carroty.
While I played with carrots in the Oskar, Lila chopped walnuts. With those two ingredients prepared, we measured out most everything else into separate bowls, with the exception of the spices. The amounts of those were small enough that having a separate dish for each would have been excessive. I used my new blender to mix the ground flax-seed and water until it was getting goopy in an egg-like consistency, and then blended in the oil from there. While I worked with the wet items, Lila prepared the dry items into a bowl. Once we had the wet and dry mixes ready, had the cake pan greased (new cake-pans are another thing on my growing wish list), and the oven preheated, we mixed the entirety of the ingredients, then pressed them into my old, on-the-verge-of-rusting 9" cake pan (my glass 9" square pan was in the dishwasher). I was careful to place the cake in the center of the lower rack, and then we cleaned up the ingredients, and measured out the sugar for the frosting.
I was quite excited when I received a sifter for my birthday, and the immediate use I got from it. Lila sifted the confectioner's sugar while I changed out the attachments on the food processor, replacing the grating blade for the cup and spinning blade. I added the cream cheese to the cup, measured in the vanilla, and then Lila added the sifted sugar. We learned (the messy way) that we should have added the sugar first. We lost a fair bit in the transfer, and had to make a best guess at how much to add once the mix was done. Again, my hand-me-down food processor is fast. We blended the ingredients for maybe 20 seconds. Maybe. And what we got was practically liquid. No spreadable frosting like we were expecting. It was more like an icing. Something to drizzle on, not spread. This would turn out to be a fortunate thing, though at the time we were disappointed. But lesson learned: if you want frosting, woman-up and mix it by hand. Food-processorize icings only.
We added some sugar to try to stiffen the frosting, and in vain I stuck the entire bowl in the fridge while the cake finished baking, and cooled. We checked the cake 5 minutes before time, and again at the given time, and again 2 minutes later. It was still kinda soft in the middle, but the edges were getting very dark and pulling away from the pan, so we removed the cake from the oven and placed the pan on a wire rack. After a while we decided to turn the cake over onto the wire rack to cool outside of the pan. That's when things got...interesting.
Our cake was very, very moist. It fell out of the pan. Well, two-thirds of it did, folding in on itself, and third stayed firmly stuck in the pan. We looked at what had become of our so-recently beautiful cake, and couldn't help but laugh. And take pictures. We scooped what we could onto a plate, and as pieces of the very moist middle fell out, we plopped them back in place, trying to create the illusion of a single cake. I pulled the liquefied frosting from the fridge, and we drizzled it over the cake-crumble. When we were done it looked sorta like a plate of cinnamon rolls. Sorta.
We tried the cake, and found it to be delicious, giving it a 8 of 10 points for taste. 2 of 10 for appearance. Lila said our trial was 50% cake, and 50% failure. I called it beautiful, in a tragic way. Between bouts of glancing at the cake and laughing, we tried to puzzle out what happened, and how we might avoid the same occurrence in the future.
Possible culprits and solutions: too many carrots; too little of the flax-seed mix getting in the actual mix (we had a fair bit stick to the edge of the blender, and not make it in the batter); put the oven rack in the center, or the upper rack, not the lower; use those cake-pan wraps that help keep the edges from heating faster than the center; add more flour; use a square pan, not round; try using the egg replacer instead of the flax-seed. Or Lila suggested we could try the recipe with a muffin pan, sans paper liners. As for the frosting/icing issue, I'm not to worried - we have made a successful cream cheese frosting for an earlier project, so I know we are capable.
Despite the tragic appearance of the end product, I had a lot of fun getting back into baking again. I have not laughed this much in a long time.
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