Visiting daughter Sarah requested a carrot cake for her early birthday celebration last week here at Struan Farm. So once again I whipped out my Barefoot Contessa carrot cake recipe, along with The Free Range Cook's cream cheese icing. The latter I jazzed up with Fresh As freeze dried passionfruit powder. The flavour is amazing, and it cuts all that rich sweetness.
Once again we also went "naked" with the cake, and I needed to come up with something for decoration on the top. I thought about doing crumbled walnuts in a ring around the edge again, but instead decided to experiment with "Candied Carrot Curls," both for colour and taste.
These are worth a try. Wide carrot peels are cooked in a sugar syrup, drained, and baked at a low temperature for a period of time. After that they are rolled around the end of a wooden spoon, and put back into the oven until crisp. While these worked, next time I would use larger carrots than I had on hand to achieve more of a corkscrew or spiral. But they tasted great and were fun! Depending on how long they are baked, they can be somewhat like a fruit leather....
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.