For J's birthday on Saturday, I baked a carrot cake with lemon curd filling and whipped cream frosting. For the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe, with 7/8 cup vegetable oil instead of 1 cup of oil/butter, ~1.3 cups of sugar instead of 2 cups, and 0.5 tsp salt instead of 1 tsp.
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| Grated carrots, eggs, and dry ingredients |
It turns out that producing four cups of grated carrots using a microplane results in a slightly sore arm, but I really can't argue with a) the satisfaction of seeing that mounded bowl of bright orange, and b) the resulting cake's moistness. I baked two 9-in layers and sandwiched Trader Joe's lemon curd in between.
For the frosting, I made whipped cream, adding sugar, cinnamon and ginger powder for flavor, and also adding some dissolved gelatin as a stabilizer (a tip I learned from smittenkitchen). I piped the little stars around the edge and base and then used blue decorating gel for the lettering.
I had originally baked and decorated this cake with a different inscription on Friday night, finishing about 21 hrs before it was going to be eaten, but noticed when I got up on Saturday morning that the decorating gel had started to bleed into the frosting. The bleeding wasn't severe, and my friends might not have even noticed, but I wanted the lettering as clean as possible. Plus, a morning conversation with E sparked the new/improved inscription, inspired by one of our favorite Cakewrecks.
So in the afternoon before the birthday celebration, I excised the old lettering, resurfaced and redecorated the top with a new batch of whipped cream, and then re-lettered. Lesson learned: if using colored decorating gel on whipped cream frosting (and maybe on other frostings, too?), apply it at late as possible. Anyway, the cake ended up looking and tasting exactly as I had wanted it to, and the birthday boy and company enjoyed it. Mission accomplished!
