Carrot Cake and the Veggie Conundrum

“Would you like me to eat more vegetables, Mom?”

Hmmm…..such a question, that wears such a simple facade, should be answered with caution and care of utmost degree, especially when asked by my smart-alecky nine year old.

Now, all this is a wisdom on the hind-sight and my immediate answer to his obviously simple, yet super complicated question was ‘yes, of course!’

And so we began… making carrot cake!

The recipe was given by our sweet friend Kami. Her husband, Virgil, who went home to the Lord last year, was our Sunday School teacher and a dear friend. Kami’s sister is the original author of this state-fair award winning recipe and I am thankful not only for the Reicherts’ friendship but also for sharing this family treasure with us.

The last I made this was at Virgil’s memorial service last year. I have misplaced the copy of the recipe ever since and so what we made today was from my memory. Reading the recipe over and over again the last time, in an effort to make it as close to perfect, for the memory of our dear friend Virgil helped. The taste was close to the one Kami makes and we all were very pleased.

There is as much amount of grated carrots in this cake as is flour. While chopped pecans contribute the crunch factor, ground nutmeg and cinnamon, along with a generous amount of oil olive, aid in intensifying the flavor.

Since I had no intention of letting the boys eat the entire cake, although it is, according to my nine year old, loaded with veggies, we decided to make twenty four cup cakes instead of two nine-inch round cakes and freeze a few.

Cream cheese based frosting is the icing on this cake — both literally and figuratively.

Eating the frosting by spoonful right from the mixing bowl and later licking the spatula is but inevitable, given the creamy, sweet deliciousness of this irresistible frosting. However, we managed to save some to frost a few for our dessert tonight.

The boys wanted an orange colored frosting, since it’s, after all, carrot cake. But since we had no orange food color at home, we used our knowledge of mixing primaries and mixed in yellow and red food colors. What seemed to work on canvas with acrylics did not work here and we ended up with a pink frosting! Needless to say, the boys were not pleased but the deliciousness of the frosting made up for the color.

We struck our frosting pen into the cake so as to inject this gooey goodness into the cake so as not to restrict it just to the top. Now, that, amused my boys so much that color was not complained about anymore!

We quickly finished the frosted cupcakes and the rest of the unfrosted ones were zip locked and were stuck into the freezer. What about the left over frosting you ask? Oh, what left over frosting??!! Please read the post again!