Carrot cake is one of those foods that confuse me. Why would you ever think of putting vegetable in a cake? It's also one thing to make a savory cake using vegetables; it's another to make a sweet cake out of them... Though I guess it doesn't matter in the end because it's good anyway.
I made this cake partly because Mallory had asked me to before. She loves carrot cake, which is a little weird because she doesn't like vegetables. Try and make her eat salad; most likely she'll refuse, albeit politely. If making carrot cake makes Mallory eat vegetables and prevents her from getting scurvy, I will proudly bake it no matter how tedious it is (it isn't, but I'm lazy).
Another reason for baking this cake was that I had bought cream cheese for frosting a while back expressly for carrot cakes, and I was beginning to worry that it was going to rot soon (to those who have had a piece: don't worry, it wasn't close to rotting... I just like to panic). We also had a lot of neglected carrots in our refrigerator that were beginning to grow purplish leaves. They were a little disconcerting, but I figured they were fine to eat. I had all of the ingredients in the apartment, so I set out to bake the cake.
While preparing the batter, I encountered a problem: the number of carrots necessary to fill 1 cup. So Martha Stewart's recipe calls for a cup of carrots. In parenthesis, it says that 2 carrots should suffice. Martha must have some pretty large carrots growing in her garden because I had to grate probably 5 carrots total to reach 1 cup. Not that that was an issue... Recently, I bought a whole bag of carrots for some odd reason, even though I knew full well that we had neglected carrots. Lucky me, I didn't have to run to the market to pick any up.
The rest of the baking went smoothly. The cake itself came out drier than I wanted it to be, but that's probably because I used an 8x8 pan than the one that the recipe calls for. After I made the batter, I realized that perhaps using sprouting carrots would make the cake less sweet. Indeed it did. But overall the cake came out fine and the cream cheese icing definitely made up for the lack of sweetness and moisture in the cake itself, so everything was okay.
For next time:
1. use carrots that are NOT sprouting weird purplish leaves
2. take out the cake earlier than 40 minutes
recipe from marthastewart.com
