Cupcakes, Just Because

Recently, a friend from work asked me to make a cake for her grandson's 3rd birthday.  Little Dakota's favorite flavor is carrot cake, it's not a flavor I have regularly, nor is it one I know a whole lot about.  I couldn't honestly tell you what a good carrot cake tastes like, so it's time to experiment!


Most of my recipes, tips and ideas come from cakecentral.com.  It is a wonderful site with cake decorators who have just made their first cake to those who are published in magazines and are on tv.  And to make things even better, it is a totally free site!


So, my first carrot cake recipe, I made for the family.  It had ok flavor (again, who am I to judge) but it also had quite a bit of texture.  While I am far from a picky eater, I don't like that many chunks in my cakes.  The second recipe tasted much better (to me) and I pulled out the dreaded food processor to make all the bits smaller.  It turned out quite scrumptious, and topped with home made cream cheese icing.  The recipe I went with was from Subee on Cakecentral.com, but with a few tweaks

• 3 cups of shredded carrots
  4 eggs
  1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  1/2 cup brown sugar (light or dark)
  3/4 cup orange juice
  1 cup sour cream
  1 cup vegtable oil
  1 tsp. vanilla
  3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  1 tsp. cinnomon
  1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  2 tsp. baking soda
  1 tsp. baking powder
  3/4 cup coconut
  3/4 cup chopped walnuts
  1/2 cup crushed drained pineapple, plus 1/4 cup pineapple juice

Instructions

Preheat oven at 325 degrees.

Add wet ingredients mix well, add dry ingredients mix well.
Use food processor to finely chop walnuts, then add carrots, pineapple, and coconut and pulse until mixture becomes a soft mash.
Add mash to wet and dry ingredients and mix gently.
Pour into prepared pans and bake until knife comes out of center of cake clean.

Although I decided this recipe was scrumptious enough to call mine, we just couldn't eat any more cake (who would have thought any one could get tired of cake).  But if I was going to pawn them off on someone, it just didn't feel right unless I made them pretty.

The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but they were pretty, and gathering there were no left overs at the family I took them to.