#29: carrot and coconut cake
a first. also dairy free. and two pairing cookbooks.
Bonjour, you. Glasgow woke up frosty under a cotton sky over the weekend, so I cooked plenty of mushrooms and dreamt of something sweet. Today’s annotated recipe is for a carrot cake and, as it has become a tradition, I send cake recipes to all of you. I hope you’ll enjoy the treat, if not the words. Over to you, Margaux
I had never made a carrot cake before. I didn’t think I liked carrot cakes either as I want butter de Normandie, and I prefer my pastries to be puffed; it’s a French tragedy of mine. Give me a ganache, not icing; it’s a texture thing, the frosty sugar tickles me and, the truth is, I’m suspicious of Victoria sponge cakes. I like my treats on the nutty side, mixed in with ground almonds or folded with polenta, sour with grapefruit or blood orange zests, or bitter with rose water. But that isn’t the point of baking a cake for someone you love. And Ludo wanted a carrot cake for our housewarming party, and L. had a fair point when he said that we had a decadent number of carrots in the fridge and little enthusiasm left for carrot soups. At least not on its own. And we’d need to pop to the shop. Anyhow, the point is we couldn’t agree on what to do with the bruised carrots and the issue had become our escape goat for the greater problems of the world. Inadequate. So, I geared up to give the carrot cake a go. I thought it might be fun to bake something new, if not to eat something baked. Turns out, I was wrong all along. The carrot cake was moist and delicious (and dairy free).
Inspiration: There isn’t a baked cake without strings attached to the cakes that were baked before. From my cookbooks’ shelf, I picked Marian Armitage’s Food Made in Shetland as I remember seeing carrot cakes inside the cake fridges around the island. Marian’s recipe firmly advocates for unsalted butter instead of oil – ‘the flavour of real butter’ – but I’m having to follow a dairy free diet at the moment. Marian Armitage’s use of desiccated coconut also prompted me to choose coconut as my dairy alternative, instead of my usual go-to almond yoghurt and milk. I flicked through my favourite cookbook for this time of the year as well: Diana Henry’s Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. There wasn’t a recipe for carrot cake but plenty of fruits and nuts-based recipes, which helped with finding the ingredients’ ratios. Diana Henry’s taste also advised me to switch the walnuts, which most recipes seem to be using but am allergic to them, for pecan nuts.
Ingredients:
for the cake
150ml olive oil
200g coconut yoghurt
1 tbsp vanilla extract
zest of 1 orange
250g of white flour (I use 00)
4 eggs
300g brown sugar
½ nutmeg, grated
3 medium-to-large carrots, grated
100g pecan nuts, roughly chopped
for the coconut icing
150g wipeable coconut cream (the Internet will give you plenty of recipes to make your own, but it’s fine to make your life easy with this store-bought trick too)
1 tbsp vanilla extract
extra pecan nuts for topping
Method:
In a large bowl, mix the olive oil, coconut yoghurt, vanilla extract and orange zest. Set aside.
In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, the sugar and the nutmeg together, until there are no crumbs left. Incorporate the flour, mixing continuously. Combine with the wet mixture. Add the grated carrots and the pecan nuts, mixing well with a wooden spoon. Let the preparation rest.
Preheat the oven to 180C. Bake for 40 minutes, though my oven is radically unreliable so, unhelpfully, I’d say keep an eye and bake until it’s cooked.
Leave the cake to cool on the counter. In the meantime, in a steel mixing bowl, pour the wipeable coconut cream and the vanilla extract. Whisk until the combo will have thickened into a whipped cream. Transfer into an airtight container and store it in the freezer for one hour, even two or three hours if you’ve time ahead of you.
When you’re ready to serve the carrot cake, dress the cake with the frozen icing and sprinkle extra pecan nuts on top.
Slice, serve, share; eat the cake.
Margaux
Thank you for reading. I’m Margaux, a writer and cook, and this is my hybrid newsletter. You can find me on Instagram and read about my novels here. If you enjoy this newsletter, feel free to forward it to a friend. You can also support my work by subscribing to The Onion Papers (Thursdays are for long reads and Mondays for annotated recipes, both come out every other weeks, though I keep a ‘pantry’ of past recipes here for you) <3
