Recipe and Tutorial: Tropical Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This recipe is my absolute go-to recipe for all things carrot cake; its origin comes from a trusted recipe in my little More Food That Really Schmecks baking book by my Canadian home-baking heroine, Edna Staebler. I've fiddled around with it over the years, adding this and removing/altering that, until I developed what I consider to be the best carrot cake recipe out there!  It's not oily, moist and tender, incredibly flavourful, and it's never failed me once (the four pillars on which I base all of my "tweaked until perfect" recipes).

This cake recipe is just the thing for those times when a vanilla or chocolate cake just won't do; it's a great recipe for cupcakes, layer cakes, sheet cakes, and even wedding cakes. You can add, substitute, or even omit several ingredients (as long as they're replaced with something else), you can change the sugars and the spices around to suit your tastes, and you can even delay putting the cake batter in the oven for a couple of hours with no effect (though I don't recommend it, as that means a couple extra hours you will be without NOMS IN YOUR FACE!)

So don't delay! Get out that grater, turn it to the small holed side, and start grating up carrots for the yummiest method ever created to eat your fruits and vegetables!

Alicia’s Tropical Carrot Cake

Original Source courtesy of More Food That Really Schmecks, Edna Staebler
Yield: Two 8" layers

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg OR mace
• ½ tsp ground cardamom
• Pinch of salt
• 1¼ cups vegetable oil
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 2 cups finely shredded carrots
• 1 cup crushed pineapple, juice reserved
• 2 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup raisins, soaked in hot water and drained/patted dry

Decorating:

• 1 cup toasted coconut (optional)
• 18-24 walnut halves (optional)
• 1 cup crushed walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350˚F. Line two 8" round cake pans with a circle of parchment in the bottom of the pan.
2. With blender or stand mixer, combine all dry ingredients (including spices).   
3. Blend in oil; add eggs, carrots and pineapple, then vanilla.  Blend well, then stir in raisins by hand.
4. Bake for 35 minutes, rotating and moving pans once during baking. Check for doneness in center of pans.
5. Cool on rack for 15 minutes, then de-pan layers, remove parchment, and allow to cool completely before icing. 

Pineapple Cream Cheese Icing

• 8 ounces cream cheese (1 pkg), softened
• ½ cup butter, softened
• 1 lb icing sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp reserved pineapple juice

Blend cream cheese and butter; slowly add icing sugar, vanilla and orange juice.  Ice only after cake is completely cold, or it will melt. Decorate as desired.

Tutorial and Recipe: Pineapple-Vanilla Bean Jam

This was the third and final of my three jams I made for my wedding favours last month. 

I had a difficult time trying to decide which preserve I would make to follow as closely to my "yellow" wedding colour; I was originally considering:

• Lemon curd (rejected due to it needing refrigeration and having a short shelf life due to the eggs in the recipe),
• Meyer Lemon Marmalade (ultimately rejected because the season for Meyer lemons was August, therefore kind of late for me; they are very difficult to find even within season; and they are heinously expensive), and 
• Caramel sauce (rejected because it was more tan than yellow, and it also needs refrigeration due to the cream in the recipe).

When I found and read over this recipe for pineapple jam, I was so relieved!  Not only was it simple and inexpensive to make, the ingredients list was stuff I actually already had on hand. Score!

As you can see from the picture, the colour came out a beautiful, sunny yellow, and I was a happy camper.

My Photoshop-talented bridesmaid (at least in comparison to me) made up some incredibly amazing jam jar labels for my three jams, but I was a derp and didn't decide on the pineapple jam in enough time, so I couldn't get them printed in time...hence my narsty printing on the labels.  The very least I can do is show off how awesome the professional-grade labels are that she slaved over in these posts!

Ta Da!!!!

Recipe and a step by step tutorial on how to make this jam is below!

Pineapple-Vanilla Bean Jam 

Original recipe: courtesy of pickyourown.org

Yield: About 4 or 5 half-pint (8oz.) jars

Best Before: 12-18 months post-processing

• 1-20-ounce can of crushed pineapple, undrained
• 1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
• 3 tbsp lemon juice
• 3-1/2 cups of granulated sugar, divided
• 1-1/2 packets powdered pectin
• Jar funnel and jar grabber 
• 1 large saucepan
• 1 large ladle
• 1 Canner(sides must be high enough to cover the tops of your chosen jars with 1" to spare
• Ball or Mason jars, lids, and rings

Step 1 - Gather the Ingredients

Gather the ingredients. In this case, canned pineapple works better, due to its consistency.

Step 2 - Get the jars and lids washed

While you don't need to sanitize the jars prior to filling them, they do need to be washed in hot, soapy water so the jars are clean and hot, and less likely to crack when you put boiling hot fruit in them. I usually like to be safe rather than sorry, so I put my freshly washed jars into my canning bath and boil them for a couple of minutes; that way they are squeaky-clean and hot by the time I'm ready to fill the jars. I take them out of the canner one at a time using rubber-tipped tongs to avoid chipping the glass.

Lids:  Put the lids into a pan of hot water for at least several minutes; to soften up the gummed surface and clean the lids.

 

Step 3 - Mix the pineapple with the pectin

Mix the pectin with 1/4 cup of the sugar (set the rest of the sugar aside for now).  This helps to keep the pectin from clumping up.

 

Stir the pectin/1/4 cup sugar mixture into the chopped fruit. Put the mix in a big pot and put it on the stove.

Notes about pectin: With pineapple I usually add about 50% more pectin (just open another pack and add about half) or else the jam is runnier than I like. BUT pineapple usually thickens pretty well, so try 1 packet and see how well it thickens. With a little practice, you'll find out exactly how much pectin to get the thickness you like. 

 

Step 4 - Bring to a boil

Add the vanilla bean and seeds, and bring the mixture to a full boil. 

Step 5 - Add the sugar and return to a full boil

Add the remaining sugar (about 3.25 cups) and the lemon juice, and bring the mixture back to a full boil.  Once it hits a full, rolling boil, stir and boil for 1 minute.

Step 6 - Fill the jars and put the lid and rings on

Fill them to within ¼-inch of the top, wipe any spilled jam off the top, seat the lid and tighten the ring around them. Then put them into the boiling water canner!

Step 7 - Process the jars in the boiling water bath

Keep the jars covered with at least 2 inches of water. Keep the water boiling. Boil them for 5 minutes (at sea level; see the table below for times at other altitudes).

Recommended process time for Pineapple Jam in a boiling water canner.
		Process Time at Altitudes of
Style of Pack	Jar Size	0 - 1,000 ft	1,001 - 6,000 ft	Above 6,000 ft
Hot	Half-pints or Pints	5 min	10	15

Step 8 - Done

Lift the jars out of the water and let them cool without touching or bumping them in a draft-free place (usually takes overnight). Once the jars are cool, you can check that they are sealed verifying that the lid has been sucked down. Just press in the center, gently, with your finger. If it pops up and down (often making a popping sound), it is not sealed. If you put the jar in the refrigerator right away, you can still use it. Some people replace the lid and reprocess the jar, then that's a bit iffy. If you heat the contents back up, re-jar them (with a new lid) and the full time in the canner, it's usually ok.

It may take up to two weeks for the jam to set and thicken up. It will be runny until then!

Once cooled, they're ready to store.   I find they last about 18 months.  After that, the get darker in color and start to get runny. They still seem safe to eat, but the flavor is bland.  So eat them in the first 12 to 18 months after you prepare them!