Ina Garten's Carrot Cake Recipe | Barefoot Contessa | Food Network

so tonight we are having a birthday celebration and of course you have to eat birthday

cake

. Everyone loves

carrot

cake

for birthday cake. I thought I'd turn it up a notch instead of just cream cheese frosting. I'm going to add Moscow pony and I'm adding crystallized ginger to the

carrot

cake to give it a lot of heat. It's going to be a really fabulous carrot cake okay so I have a pound of carrots now for the dough I need two cups of sugar one and a third cup of vegetable oil three eggs I use extra large eggs for everything and the eggs at room temperature are very important to mix well with the dough and a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract, okay, I'm just going to mix this for two minutes. until the dough is a light yellow color and quite thick, okay, now the dry ingredients, so it's just two cups of flour, two teaspoons of ground cinnamon, two teaspoons of baking soda and one and a half teaspoons of kosher salt and then they are simply sifted. to make sure there are no lumps okay now I'm going to put the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients just turn it on low and mix them in very slowly if you put them in too quickly the flour can clump up. no one wants plum flour in their cake, this actually already smells good, cinnamon and vanilla, two of my favorite flavors.

Okay, now for the good stuff, so I'm going to mix in the pound of carrots that I grated. Carrot cake is very easy to make and I love it a cup of chopped walnuts a cup of raisins if you love raisins you can add more and then a quarter cup of crystallized ginger it's also in the frosting but it's good it's in the cake Also the crystallized ginger is very spicy and sweet at the same time and I thought with carrots, raisins and walnuts I thought it would be great. I think Jane will love this cake.

Okay, it should be about a quarter cup. If you like it spicier, you can always add more than I did. I'm just going to add about a tablespoon of flour and that will keep the bottom of the cake from sinking. You don't want all the carrots and raisins at the bottom, you want them suspended in the cake batter, okay? mixed now it's time to put it in the batter just clean the whisk there's a lot of batter in the whisk and just to make sure it's mixed really well I always scrape the bottom of the bowl okay now I'm going to add everything These ingredients are I eat more carrots than batter, that's why it's such a good carrot cake and just fold it in with the spatula until it's really well mixed, oh my goodness, does that look good?

Well, I have greased and floured two nine-inch pans. and I actually also lined them with parchment paper because I've often said that there's no point in making a cake if you can't get it out of the pan. I'm just going to pour this into the two molds that you want to split. beat evenly so the cakes cook exactly the same amount of time. In the end it's quite a cake, but I want to be able to frost the middle so it looks like there's a little bit more to this one, so I'm just going to transfer it if you want to be exact, you can always use a small scale, okay, put it in the oven at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, then I will lower the temperature to 350 and bake them for 30 to 35 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean and the cakes have cooled. and I already made the frosting, let me show you how I make it first 12 ounces of mascarpone at room temperature with four ounces of cream cheese at room temperature two cups of sifted confectioners' sugar two tablespoons of heavy cream half a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract and I just beat it for about a minute until light and fluffy, then a third cup of chopped crystallized ginger, not the syrupy kind, the dry kind, like in batter, and a quarter teaspoon of kosher salt and just beat it for about 30 seconds this cake is a little different what I've done is instead of frosting the whole thing, sometimes it gets a little messy, I'm going to frost the middle and the top and then you can actually see the carrot cake throughout. and it's certainly easier because I want everyone to know that it contains ginger.

I have some extra crystallized ginger to sprinkle on top and it will be perfect for tonight's birthday dinner.