What do you do when it's not mandarin season but it's definitely Chinese New Year visitation time??
Substitute the mandarins for another orange thing - carrots!
Of course you can't have just one carrot, that would be rather rude, so I made two. These carrots also doubled (ha!) as a birthday cake for a new friend I made in Connect Group!
So here, I present my carrot cake, in the shape of - carrots!
I followed this carrot cake recipe: http://happyhooligans.ca/carrot-cake-with-cream-cheese-icing/
I baked the cake in a heart-shaped springform pan, and cut the finished cake in half. I then had to do a bit of carving to taper the sides like a carrot. Note: I found that I had to bake mine for 80 minutes (at 160 Celsius) all up because that's when the toothpick I inserted came out clean.
I also added some orange gel colouring to the cream cheese mixture, and tripled the cream cheese recipe in the link because I wanted to cover the entire cake - and I mean slather it - in cream cheese frosting. Yum.
I added some homegrown organic parsley to "top" it off!
The cake went down really well. Everyone at the dinner gathering loved it! It was moist and not too sweet, in fact, you really needed the cream cheese frosting to sweeten it up! The cake had a cinnamon-y, spice-like taste. And I couldn't taste the carrots, but I could certainly taste the texture of the grated carrots.
Someone commented - I thought I wasn't going to be able to finish this piece but I'm going to need another piece! The birthday girl was more than happy to take home the remaining cake! (So thank you happyhooligans for the recipe!)
The recipe is definitely a goer for the next carrot cake craving I have!
Substitute the mandarins for another orange thing - carrots!
Of course you can't have just one carrot, that would be rather rude, so I made two. These carrots also doubled (ha!) as a birthday cake for a new friend I made in Connect Group!
So here, I present my carrot cake, in the shape of - carrots!
I followed this carrot cake recipe: http://happyhooligans.ca/carrot-cake-with-cream-cheese-icing/
I baked the cake in a heart-shaped springform pan, and cut the finished cake in half. I then had to do a bit of carving to taper the sides like a carrot. Note: I found that I had to bake mine for 80 minutes (at 160 Celsius) all up because that's when the toothpick I inserted came out clean.
I also added some orange gel colouring to the cream cheese mixture, and tripled the cream cheese recipe in the link because I wanted to cover the entire cake - and I mean slather it - in cream cheese frosting. Yum.
I added some homegrown organic parsley to "top" it off!
The cake went down really well. Everyone at the dinner gathering loved it! It was moist and not too sweet, in fact, you really needed the cream cheese frosting to sweeten it up! The cake had a cinnamon-y, spice-like taste. And I couldn't taste the carrots, but I could certainly taste the texture of the grated carrots.
Someone commented - I thought I wasn't going to be able to finish this piece but I'm going to need another piece! The birthday girl was more than happy to take home the remaining cake! (So thank you happyhooligans for the recipe!)
The recipe is definitely a goer for the next carrot cake craving I have!
