Easter Carrot Cake

     Easter's coming, and that's exciting.  I love cooking for Easter.  It's different than cooking for Christmas, to be sure.  I would say there's less pressure, less expectation, than cooking for Christmas.  There are, of course, solid culinary traditions associated with Easter - fish on Good Friday, lamb on Easter Sunday, hot cross buns, Simnel cake, and so forth.  But I feel there is also more scope for experimentation. 
     Last year my daughter Georgiana was baptized on Good Friday, and I found myself catering for about 40 people after the event.  As I tried to think of the perfect Easter-type buffet, I was drawn to all sorts of foods - foods made with ingredients that represent Spring, foods made with fish, and foods with a middle-eastern bent - olives, almonds, dates, figs, apricots, vine leaves, goat's cheese, etc. - in memory of the life and death of Jesus Christ.  Here's a pictures of the buffet, just for fun:

     But surely, standard fare at Easter time is the carrot cake.  Georgiana's birthday is in March, and every year her birthday cake is a carrot cake. 
     I find there is something inherently interesting about carrot cake.  To my mind, it stands somewhere between a sponge cake and a fruit cake, and the possibilities are vast.  This year, I deviated from my normal carrot cake recipe and tried some different ingredients - I swapped butter for the oil, added some ground almonds, walnuts, and dried fruit.  Take a look:

Easter Carrot Cake

250 grams flour
50 grams ground almonds
1/2 tsp. mixed spice
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
250 grams butter
225 grams sugar
5 medium eggs
350 grams grated carrots
65 grams raisins
65 grams sultanas
50 grams walnuts
Juice of 1/2 orange
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Zest of 1 lemon

For icing:
Apricot jam
Cream cheese frosting.

First, in a small bowl, combine the raisins, sultanas and zest with the orange and lemon juice.  Let the fruit soak for about 20 minutes.

Grease and line two round 9-inch cake pans.  Make sure the sides of the pan are rather high. 

In a large bowl, combine the flour, ground almonds, spices, baking powder, and baking soda.  In another bowl, beat the butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each one.  Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture by the spoonful, stirring gently after each one.  When the mixtures are combined, stir in the carrots, walnuts, and the soaked dried fruit with the juices and zest. 

Divide the batter evenly between the two pans.  Bake at 350F for about 30 minutes.  A skewer should come out clean when they are done.

Let the cake cool completely.  When ready to ice, spread about 3 or 4 tablespoons of apricot jam over the surface of one of the cakes.  Frost the surface of the other cake with cream cheese frosting.  Gently bring these two surfaces together to make a sandwich.  Then frost the rest of the cake with the cream cheese frosting.

Decorate as you see fit for Easter.  I can never resist doing something like this:

 

Mock Seville Orange Curd

     I continue to yearn to cook all the things I did in England.  It is hard, though, because much of the food just isn't the same.  There are no digestives here.  Well, OK, you can get them, but they are very rare, and very expensive when you do find them.  The only chocolate here that compares to chocolate in England is the Lindt chocolate, but again, very expensive.  The brown sugar isn't as nice.  Yogurts, cheese, and crackers - forget it. 
     OK - I'll stop whining, and talk about a  success story.  I missed cooking with Seville oranges this year.  As far as I could tell, they were not available here in southern California.  I usually make a Seville orange curd tart in January or February every year, and this is enough of a distinctive event in my culinary calendar that I was really quite sad at the thought of not being able to do it. 
     Then, I remembered a Nigella cooking program that I saw at least 10 years ago now, where she made orange ice cream.  She used orange and lime zest, and said that the combination of orange and lime gave the flavor of Seville oranges.
     It was my only hope of having anything remotely like Seville orange curd this year.  I'm happy to say that it worked, and I've had my Seville orange curd fix.


Mock Seville Orange Curd

50 mls lime juice
100 mls orange juice
Zest of two limes
Zest of two oranges
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
200 grams sugar
110 grams butter, cut into smallish pieces

Combine the juices, zest and sugar in a saucepan.  Whisk in the eggs.  Add the butter pieces, and cook over a low heat until the mixture thickens, stirring constantly.  The mixture will seem thin and unpromising as you stir, but be patient, because all of a sudden it will all come together and all will be well.

     I would say that one main reason I got into cooking, and why I still do it so much, is because I have control over the final product.  I can do a meatloaf with mushrooms, or not.  I can do a vegetable curry with cauliflower and carrots, or green beans and zucchini, or anything else.  I can do  a chocolate cake with all butter, instead of using vegetable oil, or an apple crumble just the way I like it.
     So, imagine my happiness when I made granola last week.  This is only the second time I have made it, and I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to make it years ago.  I love granola - in fact, I love all cereals and am a bit of a cereal addict.  I try to stay away from the stuff because, you know, it's too many carbs blah blah, but if trying to keep at a good weight and eating a balanced diet wasn't an issue for me I would probably eat it every meal.  I've taken recently to eating a handful of cereal in a little mug with a splash of milk as a snack, and that seems to keep my depravation complex at bay.
     Anyway, back to the granola.  I have spent years loitering in the cereal isle at the grocery store, reading the label of every granola and museli available, trying to decide which one I wanted for that week (the fact that when I hit 40 my eyesight became noticeably worse when reading small print didn't make this job any easier, and my older children laughed at me when they saw me hunched over a box of cereal, squinting and moving the box closer and then farther away as I tried to decipher the fine print).  Should I go for dried pineapple and brazil nut granola? Or banana chips, dried apricots and pecans?  Dried cherries and almonds?  How about the standard raisin and hazelnut combination?  And there was always a pumpkin seed option, gently chastising me that eating granola could only be justified if it had some kind of super food.  So much of the time I just went home without any granola, simply because I just couldn't decide.
     So making granola was a bit of a revelation for me.  I could use any combination that I wanted!  Amazing!  No more looking for someone else's version of the perfect granola.  I adapted recipes from both Nigella Lawson and David Lebovitz - my new favorite food person (although Nigella will always hold a special place ...).  They both used almonds, and Nigella added raisins.  I knew I wanted something else as well, so I added pumpkin seeds, golden raisins and dried apricots.  I served it at a church brunch last Sunday, and someone commented:  'This is like Christmas!'

Customized Granola

400 grams oatmeal (not the quick-cooking kind)
150 grams whole almonds
100 grams sliced almonds
100 grams pumpkin seeds
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon all spice (mixed spice)
1/2 teaspoon salt
200 grams applesauce
3 tablespoons vegetable or sunflower oil
150 grams agave nectar
1 teaspoon vanilla
100 grams raisins
50 grams golden raisins
75 grams apricots

Grease a very large, square baking dish with vegetable oil.  Combine all the dry ingredients in a big bowl, except for the raisins, golden raisins and apricots.  Put the oil, agave, vanilla and applesauce in a saucepan, and heat gently until they are well combined.  Pour this mixture over the dry ingredients, and mix well until the dry ingredients are thoroughly coated.  Pour into the prepared pan, and bake at 300F/150C for about an hour, giving it a good stir about every 20 minutes.

     And the fab thing about this is, the nut and fruit combinations are up to you.  Just keep the quantities the same, but chop and change as you will.  I see myself making this on a regular basis ...