In all my efforts to use up the cabbages I get with my organics box, I’ve been neglecting the carrots, and I suddenly realized the other day that I had a big backlog. At the same time I was craving cake, so carrot cake seemed in order. I have an amazing recipe from the Rebar Cookbook for a layered carrot cake but I don’t really need to eat an entire cake by myself, and it’s not all that convenient to take on the subway so I can pawn them off on my coworkers. So instead, I found a recipe for carrot cupcakes with white chocolate cream cheese icing (yes, they’re as good as they sound) and baked up a batch. 12 cupcakes used up 2 cups of grated carrot (about three carrots) so I’ll be making another batch soon, I think.
The recipe is quite good but as per usual I made a bunch of modifications. Here’s what I did:
• Cut back quite a bit on the sugar – 2/3 or 3/4 cup of white instead of 1 1/8; 1/4 cup of brown instead of 1/3 – and I used raw sugar instead of brown as I’m out of brown. If you don’t ice them you may want to use more sugar than I did, but with the icing they’re plenty sweet.
• Doubled or even tripled the spices – I like lots of ginger and cinnamon and they’re good for you, too. I might add some grated fresh ginger next time I make these.
• Used pecans instead of walnuts (allergies) – one commenter said she used coconut instead of walnuts and that would be good, too.
• I halved the icing recipe (saved the other half of the cream cheese block in the freezer for next time) and still had too much icing. If you can do the math, a 1/3 recipe would probably work.
• Cut back on the sugar in the icing – 1 2/3 cup instead of 2 cups.
• Used the zest of one orange instead of orange essence, which I don’t have and didn’t want to buy. A mixture of lemon and orange would be good, too.
Kat eats local in Toronto 