It was that time of year again - the weekend of the annual food, art and craft festival in the next village which goes by the name "L'Art et Lard". It's a wonderful event.
On the Sunday there is a pop-up tea room called the English Tea Garden for which I usually contribute some cakes. This year I made two vegan and two gluten free cakes, one being something I had never tackled before; a GF carrot cake.
I used a recipe from the website "Jane's Patisserie" which you can see here. The recipe seemed straightforward, very similar to a normal carrot cake but with GF flour. An interesting tip that I had never used before was to grate the carrots with a medium fine grater, not a coarse one, thereby avoiding strips of visible carrot in the cake and giving a better texture. That really worked.
As a precaution I used a couple of spoonfuls of the mixture to make two muffins, baked alongside the cake. This enabled me to taste test the cake before giving it away, something I now always do when handing over a cake to a new recipe that I haven't used before.
The muffins tasted delicious, lightly spiced and moist with a soft texture.. I then decided to push the boat out and ice the cake, even adding the little sugar carrots I had brought with me from a previous trip to the UK.
Then things went pear shaped........I had a total disaster with the cream cheese frosting.
I beat the butter and icing sugar together according to the recipe and then added the cream cheese. As I started to beat it in and within moments the whole lot turned to liquid. I went into panic mode. The cake was meant to be at the festival half an hour later and I had no more cream cheese.
Nick volunteered to go and fetch more but that would have taken anything up to an hour, probably much longer if the nearest supermarket didn't have any in. Instead I made a batch of ordinary buttercream and iced the cake with that. It looked a real bobby dazzler and sold well on the day.
The question is, what went wrong? A bit of research suggested that the fat content of the cheese was too low. I hadn't been able to get Philadelphia cheese, which I normally use, and had picked one at random not realising that it wouldn't work.
As for the glurpy cream cheese mixture - I turned it into ice cream - the ingredients had cost too much to waste them! I beat a few tablespoons of full fat double cream to the floppy stage, folded it into the mixture and put it in the freezer. It was delicious - in fact absolutely divine! I shall probably make it again but will always think of it as my "Accidental Ice Cream"!
I was so put out by the failure of the cream cheese that I did some more research and one fact that cropped up everywhere is that whatever you do, you should not try mixing more icing sugar into the liquid mixture, which had in fact, been my first instinct. Luckily I had been in too much of a hurry on the day to try it! A good guide to the problem can be found here. The website "Jane's Patisserie" has a good guide to making the frosting here.
Ingredients
For the cake
300g (approx 3 medium) carrots, grated medium fine
275 g soft light brown sugar
5 eggs
225ml sunflower oil
zest of 1 orange
325g gluten free self raising flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
100g raisins
For the cream cheese frosting
175g unsalted butter at room temperature
175g icing sugar
350g full fat cream cheese
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
Alternative buttercream icing
150g unsalted butter at room temperature
300g icing sugar, sifted
1-2 tblsp milk
½ tsp vanilla extract
Method
Grease a 20cm round springform cake tin and line the base with baking paper.
Preheat the oven to 180° C / 160° fan.
Put the oil, carrots, sugar, eggs and orange zest into a large bowl and mix well.
Sift in the flour and spices, add the raisins and mix again until smooth and well combined.
Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 30-35 minutes until done. Cool in the tins.
To make the cream cheese frosting
Put the butter into a medium bowl and beat until smooth.
Add the icing sugar, cinnamon and vanilla and beat again.
Beat in the cream cheese until just combined.
Spread half of the mixture onto one of the cooled cakes and place the second cake on top. Spread or pipe the other half of the mixture on top of that and decorate as you prefer.
To make the alternative buttercream icing
Put the butter into a medium bowl and beat until soft. Add the icing sugar a spoonful at a time and beat until smooth. Beat in the vanilla and a splash or two of milk to get the consistency you prefer. Use half to sandwich the cakes together and the other half to decorate the top.
Cuts into 10-12 slices.
I totally recognised your panic mode as the same thing happened to me years ago! I used St Moret as Philadelphia wasn’t so widely available then. Instant pool of liquid. I ended up making glacé icing. That’s an interesting link - I know to use full-fat cheese, but didn’t know the tip about beating butter and icing sugar thoroughly first. I don’t often frost my carrot cakes as they have to hang around at room temperature at choir practice, but I’ll try and remember this.
ReplyDeleteHaving never had this happen to me before it definitely came as a shock. In fact I am sure I have used low fat cream cheese before successfully too, which makes it even more odd.
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