Better for you Carrot Cake

I found a cake recipe online when I went looking for one with less sugar and perhaps a higher glycemic index. The one I found, I added pineapple to it and it was well received. It made a beautiful cake.

Better for you Carrot Cake Recipe
 Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Line a 9 x 13" pan with parchment paper and grease the sides.

Combine in a large bowl:
1 1/2 cups flour
2/3 cup flax meal
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Combine in a medium bowl:
2 1/2 cups finely grated carrot
1 cup finely chopped pineapple, juices squeezed out
4 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Make a well in the dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients. Stir just until combined.
Bake at 350 for 30 - 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted near centre comes out clean.
Cool in pan for 10 minutes and then cool on a wire rack.

I made this recipe of icing to make the cake pictured. I added the pink fondant flower after, but the rest is:

Cream Cheese Icing
4 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup butter, softened
1 - 2 Tbsp. milk
3 cups icing sugar, sifted

Combine all ingredients and stir until smooth.

Obviously, the cream cheese icing is not "better for you", but hey, if you want icing, it's gotta be icing, right?

Enjoy!

Creamy Carrot Coffee Cake

Carrots! Carrots! Carrots! We finally picked the last of our carrots on Friday and I had a baking day with them on Saturday! That was fun. My favorite thing I made was the Creamy Carrot Coffee Cake.

This was a recipe in "Company's Coming Mostly Muffins" page 137. It is awesome! A nicely spiced, decadent cake that was just plain delicious. Loved the cream cheese icing on top. Just enough to be perfect! I used fresh pineapple instead of canned and omitted the nuts they called for. It was a good use of carrots, to be sure. I can post the recipe if you leave me a comment to that effect.

Have a nice day!

40th Birthday Cake

This may not be my most beautiful cake ever, but a good deal of thought went into it. I made it for my older sister who insists she is not having any more birthdays. ha ha. But she is always busy at something and she is great at what she does, so I had to celebrate it. I put a few of her favorite and/or most important roles and passtimes on her cake in three dimensional fondant figures.

 

The cake itself is a two-layer carrot cake with cream cheese icing and filling. The figures are all fondant and gum paste. Warning: do not put fondant on cream cheese icing until you MUST because it softens quickly due to the fat in the cream cheese. It also turns shiny and looks greasy. Here's the view from the other side:

 

It was easy to decorate, once I had made the figurines. I marked off the cake in 6ths (hidden under border that was added later) and then piped the lettering. Then I added the borders and finally I added the figurines at the last moment. My only regret is not giving more space where it was needed around the tent and less around the "40" but that's how it was divided. And apparently I should have written "Carol is 39 again."

Happy Canada Day!

Sorry, I'm a little late, but Happy Canada Day! I celebrated with a big bash and this awesome cake!

I actually made it to celebrate my mom and dad's 40th wedding anniversary. It was a labour of love. Each rose took about an hour to make. The three cakes took about 4 hours to bake. Then the buttercream, fondant and decorations took about 8 hours to do! The small cake was a white cake with a lemon curd filling. The medium cake was a carrot cake with a cream cheese icing filling and the large cake was chocolate with chocolate fudge filling. They were all so good. Only 5 pieces of cake were left at the end of the day. We shared it among the 43 of us.

Mom's Birthday Cake

Our house is still in the recovery stages of the flu, so nobody is eating much and I haven't baked a thing in days. It is weird. But I had to show you something nice so I looked up some past projects and wanted to share this one with you. It is a carrot cake I made for my mother in November. I covered it in a cream cheese icing and all these lovely flowers. She loved it - because it was home-made, a carrot cake and it had cream cheese icing.

I made the flowers and leaves out of fondant and a bit of gum paste. I cut them with fondant cutters (plastic cookie cutters). I shaped the petals with a fondant shaping tool. I got the tool and cutters in my Wilton's Fondant and Gum Paste Flowers course supplies. Cookie cutters and a knitting needle would do the same trick. Here's some more detail of the cake:

I thought I had tinted the cream cheese icing for the trim and writing a pretty blue, but I was not happy with it once it was on the cake. By then it was late and I left it. My mother loves me anyway! I noticed that the flowers went soft again once they were on the cake. I think they soaked up the fat from the icing beneath them. It all tasted delicious anyway so it was all good. This time, I did the writing free-hand.