To a kid in third grade, carrot cake is not as exciting as, say, chocolate or lemon, even if your mom is a Berkley co-op-shoppin', bag-carrying, whole-grain-bread-only kinda lady. It might even be shocking, if you had never seen a carrot cake. I mean, you are only in the third grade after all. Which is why when no one ate by birthday cupcakes, I was traumatized.
But don't fret, for some weird reason, I still love carrot cake after all that. And so when I wanted to make a cake for my girlfriend's birthday, I thought of the old standard, not-in-Japan carrot cake.
In my search for the perfect carrot cake recipe I found a blog post by a cake maker called The Ultimate Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting! "Looks promising," I thought. And when I saw this, I knew this was the cake I would make;
“This is the best cake I’ve ever eaten!” was the reaction from my husband Graham to my latest creation. He has tasted many cakes during our 21 years together, so I pay attention when he makes a proclamation like this. I have to agree, this one is a winner!I am not particularly good at making cakes because I have made very few, but if you have a good recipe, it really can't be that hard, can it? Welcome to Japan, where burritos have no beans and good carrot cake recipes are few and far between. If you want to make a good recipe here you have to translate from the original English. Sounds easy, until you get to all the variables like confectioners' sugar (that was hard to explain and find) or all-purpose flour (apparently, all-purpose flour is half way between the two grades of flour in Japan. Try searching for that explanation in Japanese!). Not to mention finding the ingredients like clove and nutmeg.
