American Carrot Cake

Is this call impulse ? spontaneity ? craving ? whatever excuse I could think of. None better than, yes, I have done it! Yesterday evening, had this sudden desire(a better word?) to eat American Carrot Cake and I remember Aunty Yochana had a receipe on it and quickly browsed through the receipe steps and within minutes, you can visualise me busy in the kitchen, grating the carrots, chopping the walnuts, measuring the ingredients etc etc. Yes, the me in the kitchen in the very 'engaged' mode.

As usual, the 'sotong' me assumed that I had enough cake flour for the baking and only when I commenced on the weighing and measuring that I realised that there is slight shortfall. 'Should I re measure the rest of the ingredients?' I thought not. So, in the end, I had flour mixture of cake flour, self raising flour with abit of corn flour to sort of balance up, hopefully. Yeps, I was keeping my fingers crossed during the mixing.

And as I was going to follow the topping icing frosting layer exactly according to Aunty's receipe, I kinda reduced the sugar to the US carrot cake to only 150gm (half of the recommended sugar) instead so that the overall cake taste will not be too sweet. (coz theres a need to cut down on sugar intake for my Mom per se).

However, I was pretty generous with use of the cinnamon powder, instead of just 1.5tsp, I added in about 2.5tbsp. I love spice and herbs, both Chinese and Western. It sets off a natural, fragrant aroma that fills up the whole house and maybe my neighbour's as well. This is the link to Aunty's homemade goodness receipe for American carrot cake : http://auntyyochana.blogspot.com/2007/08/american-carrot-cake.html

The preparation time was about 30 mins, baking time about 1 hour, cooling time 1 hour (room temperature), mixing of the cream cheese about 10 mins, spreading of the topping on the cooled carrot cake about 5 mins, into the fridge for the topping to settle about 3 hrs. (all manual labour, yepz, you know, whisking with all my might, shifting the flour, grating the carrot, blending and mixing... phew.... )
{of coz the baking and the frosting will be the oven and the fridge. =D)

The whole process of the baking was really worthwhile. My 'Americano' Carrot Cake was dome shaped, perhaps because of the cake flour with baking powder plus self raising flour with corn flour. Ill trained as I am, the frosting layer is not levelled, but i like the unlevelled 'look' coz it reminds me of the snow covered rocky mountains in NZ when I was there for holiday some years back.

Lets say I would give myself a pass rate for this moist, soft, crunchy walnuts, topped with lemonly taste cream cheese frosting. Lovely!

Thank you Aunty Yochana for the generous sharing and guidance.