My nephew’s first ever birthday cake. <3
Such an honour to have had the chance to make this for this little boy starting his life in quarantine. No worries, he’s good and well surrounded plus, he liked the cake and the frosting so it’s confirmed: he’s also pretty cool.
Cakes aren’t something I dare to make often, for obvious reasons. Luckily this delicious experience turned out to be perfectly moist and, just as I hoped, with a strong flavour of cinnamon and a touch of sweet nutmeg. You can manually grate the carrots for this but, my personal favorite will be to use the hand blender. The icing is not fully solid, nor too drippy either so it’s easy to spread and won’t fall everywhere as it sits in the fridge for a few hours. Without being too sweet, it’s a definitely noticed added sweetest that balances all the strong and subtle flavours of the cake which I hope you will enjoy.
Another important trick to remember is to FOLD the dry ingredients in to the wet ones. As we want a crumbly texture in result, the goal is to avoid the flour having time to build too much gluten which would create a more elastic texture once baked. Gluten development happens when we over mix the batter like when we make bread. As when we want to make a batch of perfectly crumbly muffins, making cake isn’t much different.
Oh and guess what?? You make this beauty a good day in advance and keep it in the fridge overnight until you’re almost ready to serve. For top notch results, leave it outside of the fridge for 30 minutes before serving.
- Cake:
- 10g of room temperature salted butter
- 10g of light tasting oil
- 1 large egg
- 110g of cane sugar
- 40g of unsweetened apple sauce
- 100g of oat milk
- 170g of "riced" or grated carrots
- 250g of all purpose flour
- 10g of baking soda
- 3g of baking soda
- 5g of cinnamon
- 0.3g of nutmeg
- Icing:
- 250g of light cream cheese
- 200g of powdered sugar
- 5g of oat milk
- 30g of room temperature butter
- - Pre-heat oven at 350. Grease a non stick 8" diameter round cake pan.
- - Make the icing. I started to use the stand mixer and switched to the hand malaxer half way in. In retrospect, the hand malaxer is my preferred way but you can still make it in the stand mixer and/or by hand. Start by fluffing the cream cheese with the soft butter, add the sugar slowly and make sure to break all the clumps. Add the milk and speed up the whisking to introduce as much air as possible in the icing. Transfer in a pot with a lid and leave in the fridge until you're ready to ice the cake.
- - In a mixing bowl, mix all the dry cake ingredients together. Reserve.
- - In another bowl, cream the cane sugar with the butter and oil, then add the egg and whisk well to make a smooth paste. mix in the rest of the wet ingredients together.
- - Transfer the mixed dry ingredients in the bowl with the wet ones and FOLD IN GENTLY the preparation until all the four is hydrated.
- - Transfer the cake batter in greased the round mold and spread it evenly + smooth the top (as much as possible - using a wet spatula helps) before baking for 25 minutes.
- - wait before it's cool down before cutting.
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