TWD: Carrot Cake!

Success! Well, mostly. This week's TWD challenge, by Amanda of Slow Like Honey, was for Bill's Big Carrot Cake. I'd been intrigued by this one since I first brought home Dorie Greenspan's book. I love a big, beautiful cake and I've never made a carrot cake at home, although it's one of my favorites.

We baked the three-layer cake in 9-inch rounds, as suggested by the recipe. I checked the oven temperature with an oven thermometer to ensure that the heat was right. I left the cakes in the oven, undisturbed, until it was time to check for doneness. And still, the cakes sank. Just a few mm right in the center, but when we stacked them three-high, the sink was more apparent. This also happened with my 1-2-3-4 cake! What gives?

The taste, however, was extraordinary. We omitted the coconut (I can't stand it) and used walnuts and golden raisins as filler alongside the carrots. With the cream cheese frosting, the final product was delicate and moist and very rich. We served it to friends with homemade vanilla ice cream and iced coffee (this is Tucson, after all). More photos here.

I can't wait to make one of these for my mother's birthday. Carrot cake is her favorite, and this may be the best balance of richness/tenderness I've ever tasted in one.

TWD: Marshmallows

Lee and I have joined an online baking club, where we'll be cooking our way through Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. This week's recipe, chosen by Judy's Gross Eats, was for marshmallows.

It's very interesting to join a club like this: the recipes are chosen by a different club member each week, and it's liberating to have someone else select which recipe we have to try. I've been wanting to practice my baking skills more, and this is a great way to do it. 

I'll confess that I don't know if I ever would have made homemade marshmallows if not for this TWD challenge (although Lee has been curious about them; he's more of the candy guy around here), and I certainly wouldn't have tried them in April, where (in Tucson) hot chocolate season is over. But I'm definitely glad I did; it was good candy practice and we had pretty successful results.

Lee, as I mentioned, is the main candy maker around here, and he is the one who made these; I just helped. But since he's out of town, I'll write on our behalf.

The recipe was pretty simple: basically, a meringue with gelatin and flavoring. We whipped some egg whites and added the sugar syrup and gelatin. At this point, they smelled disgusting, slightly meaty (gelatin). But with addition of our homemade vanilla, voila! The mixture was transformed into the sweet-smelling marshmallows we know and love.

Next, we poured them into a lined, cornstarch-dusted baking sheet and let them rest for three hours. Getting them out was definitely the trickiest part. They looked like perfect little marshmallows on the top, but the undersides were a little chewed up from being scraped from the pan. Also, our pan might have been a bit too large, because they looked more like little duvets than little pillows. 

But they tasted like fresh, melt-in-your mouth vanilla marshmallows. I think we'll be making this again, with a few adjustments to the lining method/pan size, come winter.