Carrot sugee cake
Inspired by my last attempt on the traditional Eurasian treat
Before I was a cook, I exclusively baked because the precise measurements and instructions in baking cookbooks provided the structure that I needed to get comfortable in the kitchen. While I do far more cooking than baking these days, I still have a sweet tooth. I don’t have cravings for sugary bars or drinks, but I never say no to quality desserts. And if there is any sweet worth perfecting, it is a classic like carrot cake. When I first started baking, my favourite recipe for carrot cake was Dean Brettschneider’s. What sets his version of this cake apart is its all-in-one-bowl simplicity and the low-and-slow oven treatment - 1½ hours of baking! I may not have made carrot cake in years, but I have a clear idea of what makes a carrot cake that is worth eating - lavishly spiced, ultra-moist, with a rustic crumb that is full of toasted walnuts and shredded carrots. Never cloyingly sweet, dry, or tough.
Most carrot cakes owe their moistness to the use of vegetable oil in place of butter, but the downside of this is that, because the oil is employed in such vast quantities, its flavour ends up being unpleasantly discernible in the finished cake. Recently I’d baked sugee cake, a traditional Eurasian treat based on pound cake, and was thrilled with how simultaneously rich, plush, and buttery it was. I thought why not do a sugee x carrot cake mashup? In place of white sugar in the original sugee cake, I used brown sugar for that hit of molasses. And of course, there had to be a generous amount of shredded carrot (I used two whole carrots for one loaf tin)!
Spices are the soul of carrot cake; each pastry cook’s carrot cake carries its own unique signature. Recently, Wex was waxing lyrical about the carrot cake that his Iranian colleague brought to work, which he surmised must have been made with a proprietary spice blend. While Claire Saffitz uses a combination of ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, David Lebovitz swaps out ground ginger for ground nutmeg. I chose to go with ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom - I find that cardamom complements cinnamon particularly well in baked goods like kardemummabullar. It is not at all painstaking to grind cardamom by hand - one simply places the pods in a mortar and gently crack them open with a pestle. Discard the green, empty husks, and grind the black seeds to a fine powder.
What makes carrot cake so special is its texture - shaggy from the grated carrot and nubbly from toasted walnuts. Like Saffitz, I grind the walnuts into a semi-fine rubble so that most are fine enough to integrate into the crumb, but I’ve left some larger pieces for texture. Carrot cake lovers tend to be split about what should or shouldn’t be included in the batter: Shredded coconut? Raisins? Pineapple? I kept things simple and stuck with carrot and walnuts - there’s lots going on with just those two add-ons.
Frosting-wise, I was initially tempted by Saffitz’s brown butter cream cheese frosting, but decided against it because it seemed over-the-top for a cake that is already so complex, richly spiced, and buttery. I wanted a frosting that was comfortingly simple and to-the-point. To a base of cream cheese and butter, I add just a touch of crème fraîche to brighten things up (many recipes use lemon zest but I find the zestiness distracting). Most cream cheese frostings call for heaps of icing sugar presumably to thicken the frosting, but you won’t need that much sugar if the balance of butter to cream cheese is right. The result is a cream cheese frosting that is good enough to swipe from the bowl.
The cake baked up gloriously moist and dark. At first bite, I immediately noticed the sheer range of textures in the cake - the surprising crunch of the walnuts, the tender chew of the semolina, and the shagginess of the grated carrot. The simplicity of the frosting also shone, with the crème fraîche providing a subtle acidity which tempered the richness of the cake. But the ultimate standout was surprisingly the three tiny cardamom pods that were ground - you wouldn’t think that their flavour would come through in a cake like this, but they certainly stood their ground without being overly assertive. Split in half and frosted, this is a luxurious everyday cake, though it could be a special-occasion cake too. After we downed two slices of cake each, Wex looked up how many calories there were in a slice and declared that we have each consumed 500 calories. Regardless, there is joy in cake and I think everyone should try to find it.
Carrot Sugee Cake
MAKES A 9-BY-4-INCH (23-BY-10-CM) CAKE