Super Soft Carrot Cake
Overview
A three-layer carrot cake spiced with cinnamon and mixed spice, drizzled with orange juice while still warm, and filled with cream cheese frosting. The contributor is South African, and the cake is presented as a fixture of tea parties and meetings there. Carrot cake is European in origin, so it sits in Worldwide Recipes. Its ancestry runs back to medieval carrot puddings, made at a time when sweeteners were expensive and carrots were among the sweetest things available, which is the grain of truth behind the source's note that carrots were once used to sweeten confectionery. The modern iced cake is a twentieth-century development, and its firm adoption into South African home baking is real and worth recording, even though the dish is not African in origin. Two things about this version are its own. Treacle sugar, alongside brown sugar, is a distinctly South African ingredient and gives a deeper, more molasses-like flavour than brown sugar alone. And the orange juice poured over the layers as they come out of the oven is what the title's "super soft" refers to, the same principle as soaking a sponge in syrup, using juice instead. The source's ingredient list garbles the frosting quantities. The proportions here come from its written recipe, which is coherent.
Ingredients
Dietary tags are provided by contributors as a guide, not verified by AFN, and they depend on the products you buy. If you have a serious allergy, check every ingredient yourself. Cooking, allergies and your own judgement
Directions
- 1
Heat the oven to 180°C.
- 2
Whisk the eggs in a medium bowl, then mix in the canola oil and vanilla essence.
- 3
Whisk in the treacle and brown sugars until fully combined, followed by the milk. Set aside.
- 4
Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the cinnamon and mixed spice.
- 5
Combine the wet ingredients with the dry and mix until there are no lumps, then fold the grated carrot through.
- 6
Line a 30 cm pan with baking paper or butter it well. Divide the batter into three equal portions and bake them one at a time, 30 minutes each, so you end up with three layers. With three pans you can do it in one go.
- 7
For the icing, whisk the butter in a medium bowl for 3 to 4 minutes until it looks fluffy. Sift in the icing sugar and whisk until incorporated, then whisk in the vanilla essence and cream cheese until smooth. Set aside.
- 8
Drizzle orange juice over the cakes as soon as they come out of the oven. This is what keeps them soft.
- 9
Once cool, assemble by layering cake and frosting all the way to the top.
Africook’s Notes
Personal notes from Tshego Stone- Drizzle the orange juice while the cakes are still hot. Cold cake will not absorb it, and this is what the recipe's name refers to.
- Treacle sugar is what gives this its depth. Dark brown or muscovado sugar is the nearest substitute outside South Africa.
- Grate the carrots finely. Coarse shreds stay noticeable in the crumb and release water unevenly.
- The source's stated quantity of carrot is low for a three-layer cake. Around 1 1/2 cups grated is a more reliable amount.
- Have the butter and cream cheese at room temperature before whisking, or the frosting will be lumpy.
- Do not over-whisk the frosting once the cream cheese is in. It slackens and becomes difficult to spread.
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