(no subject)

[which_chick]

Preliminary cake notes while it is still fresh in my mind. (Cake is in oven.)



I am cooking at 325. Recipe said 300 but that's really rather low for a cake. 325 is more usual.

I did not measure the amount of carrots I grated. I grated carrots until I was tired of grating carrots, somewhere close to a pound of carrots. I also did not measure the amount of carrots I cooked and pureed, about which more later. Maybe I should have measured these things.

I used 1 Tbsp. cinnamon, 1/4 each of nutmeg, ginger, cloves. 1 teaspoon vanilla. I'm not sure I'm in love with the nutmeg, but I'm reserving final judgment on that until the cake is out of the oven and frosted and tasted for real. The cloves are OK and the ginger definitely works for me.

Oil reduced to a cup, made of 1/2 stick butter melted and then canola to fill up the cup measure. (1/2 stick of butter, melted, is not 1/4 cup even though it says that on the paper. Melting changes the volume. I'm starting to hate volume-based measurements, by the way.)

On the carrot puree I added: I measured about four oz. of carrots on my scale. I cooked the carrots in the oven (baked with a little water) until they were tender. I cut them up and put them in the blender. They did not blend. (Four oz. is not very many carrots. It's like three.) I added some water so that they would blend. They did not blend. I added some more water and some of the grated raw carrots to bulk up the material in the blender enough to get it to blend. No blending. I added a wee bit more water. Finally it blent. Okay. So then I have rather more mushy than expected blended carrot. I put that in a saucepan and reduced the water out of it by way of cooking it at the boil until it was suitably applesauce-like. (Without measuring, again. I should fucking learn to measure, here.) How much carrot puree did I use? No clue. Some. Not a whole lot. How wet was it? About like applesauce. Next time there will be measuring, I promise.

The batter tasted good. It's still on the sweet side for my tastes but I'm hoping that it tones down some in the cooked version. (If not, I'm going to have to read up on how to reduce sugar in recipes and still have 'em work.) Spices tend to become more prevalent after cooking, too, which I think will help. It's a cut above the previous, as far as the batter, so yay on that.

Comments

[d-ubervillain.livejournal.com]

You have a scale, and you mock my immersion blender. So much the better for me, because I get more bad cake than good cake, and we are not cake snobs here. That said, marzipan carrots would really show you care.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Brown sugar?