Overwintered Carrot Cake

My wife, the baker in the family, took one look at our recent harvest of overwintered carrots and knew what she had to make: carrot cake.

I know what you are thinking: There could hardly be anything more mundane than carrot cake. But trust me: once you've made it with carrots you've grown in your own garden, carrots that have been storing themselves in the ground and getting sweeter all winter long just waiting for you to think of something to do with them--once you have some of those carrots to work with your carrot cake will rise to something special indeed.

Plus, my wife does not make ordinary things. Her baked goods invariably are extraordinary. This particular carrot cake is infused with the flavor of ginger and topped with an orange-cream cheese frosting. We liked the first one so much (meaning it lasted until maybe the next day) that she made it again and cut it into these cheery little morsels to serve at our recent chilaquiles brunch. It wasn't long before the only thing left on the buffet were a few crumbs.

Here's the recipe as found in The New Best Recipe, from the editors of Cook's Illustrated:

For the cake:

2 1/2 cups (12 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 pound carrots, peeled

1/2 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

4 large eggs

1 tablespoon grated orange zest

1 1/2 cups canola oil

Place an oven rack in the middle position and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 13 by 9-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper and spray the paper as well.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.

Shred the carrots using the shredding attachment in a food processor(there should be about 3 cups). Add carrots and crystallized ginger to bowl with dry ingredients and set aside. Wipe out food processor and fit with metal blade. Process granulated and brown sugars with eggs and orange zest until frothy and thoroughly combined, about 20 seconds. With machine running, add oil through feed tube in a steady stream. Process until the mixture is light in color and well emulsified, about 20 seconds longer. (Note: these steps could also be done using an ordinary box grater, a mixing bowl with a whisk and some elbow grease.) Scrape the mixture into a large bowl. Stir in the carrots and dry ingredients and mix until everything is fully incorporated. Pour mix into prepared baking pan and bake until a toothpick or skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan from front to back halfway through the baking time. Cool the cake to room temperature in the pan on a wire rack, at least 2 hours.

For the frosting:

8 ounces cream cheese, softened but still cool

5 tabelspoons unsalted butter, softened but still cool

1 tablespoon orange juice

1 tablespoon grated orange zest

1 1/2 cups (5 ounces) confectioners' sugar

When the cake is cool, process the cream cheese, butter, orange juice and orange zest in a clean food procewssor until combined, about 5 seconds, scraping down the workbowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the confections' sugar and process until smooth, about 10 seconds.

Run a paring knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan. Invert the cake onto a wire rack, peel off the parchment and invert the cake onto a serving platter or cake stand. Using an offset spatula, spread the frosting evenly over the surface of the cake. Cut into squares and serve.

Baking Ain't For Sissies

What you see here is an angel food cake that started out with great hopes and expectations and ended in utter disaster.

Why, you might ask, is The Slow Cook making angel food cake? Shouldn't he be out tending his garden?

The short of it is, we had a freezer full of frozen egg whites from months of recipes calling mostly for egg yolks. The plan was to convert these whites into angel food cakes that I could deliver to the kids in my "food appreciation" classes as an end-of-year treat.

The first blunder was dumping a four-cup container of egg whites into the blender bowl. Somehow I had it in my head that this constituted one dozen eggs. In fact, four cups (almost) equates to 24 egg whites--something that was clearly indicated on the label my wife had affixed to the container. I soon realized my error when the eggs white under influence of a rapidly beating blender began overflowing the bowl.

After reading the recipe several times and having gotten the procedure more or less fixed in my head, my wife intervened, urging me to measure out the ingredients for both of the two cakes I had in mind, rather than doing them each separately. This is how time is saved in a busy kitchen, she intoned.

Not only did I measure out the dry ingredients for two cakes, I mixed them all together. But by some fiendish trick of physics, two cups of double-sifted cake flour mixed with three cups of granulated sugar does not result in five cups of material. Questioning my own sanity at this point, and after a brief huddle with the baking-expert wife, I decided that I must have forgotten two of the three cups of sugar, so I added two more.

This is how you end up with a sticky, treacly sweet angel food puddle rather than the light, fluffy angel food cake we had in mind. Make that two cakes down the drain.

Kids, I hope you like pound cake from Whole Foods.

Rhubarb Tea Cake

I've had my near-death experience with rhubarb.

When I was a boy, my father cleared a place for a garden behind our home outside Chicago. One day I came up behind him while he was spreading cow manure for the rhubarb bed and caught a tine from his pitchfork right between the eyes. There was a great rush to get hold of the doctor, some urgent concern about tetanus. I survived okay--I still have both eyes--but never forgot that rhubarb loves a meal of rich organic matter.

Many years later, I am watching the rhubarb I planted from bare roots last year develop into big, lush plants. You should wait at least until the second season before harvesting any of the stalks. Better to let all that photosynthesis feed the developing roots. By the third season, you can harvest all you like.

When I was growing up, we had so much rhubarb that it was boiled into a seemingly endless quantity of something we called "rhubarb sauce." It seemed that spring consisted entirely of this sweet mush, breakfast, lunch and dinner. While I am waiting for my own rhubarb plants to mature, I content myself with a few stalks from the local Whole Foods. And since I recently wrote on the subject for Martha Stewart, I decided to try one of her recipes for a recent meeting of gardening cohorts.

I don't consider myself a "tea" kind of guy. But these rhubarb tea cakes from the March issue of Martha Stewart Living looked awfully appealing. Martha's advice is to divide the batter between eight individual loaf pans, each lined with buttered parchment paper. That sounds so awfully Martha, but also a lot of work--especially when we didn't have all eight of the mini-loaf pans. So I made this in one standard-sized loaf pan, 5 inches by 9 inches.

For the cake:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour cream
8 ounces rhubarb cut into 1/4-inch dice (2 cups)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. In a mixer set at medium-high speed, beat butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Continue beating and add vanilla. Reduce speed to low and mix in some flour, then some sour cream, then more flower and more sour cream alternately until both are completely incorporated. Stir in rhubarb.

Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan dusted with flour (or sprayed with Baker's Joy). Place in oven on a baking sheet and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 40 minutes. Place loaf pan on a wire rack to cool.

For the rhubarb syrup:

1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
1 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
4 ounces rhubarb, cut into 1/4-inch dice (1 cup)

Use the tip of a paring knife to scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into a small sauce pan. (Put the leftover pod in the canister of vanilla sugar you keep in your pantry.) Add water and sugar and bring to a simmer , stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove pan from heat and stir in rhubarb. Let cool, then remove rhubarb with a slotted spoon and reserve. Return pan to heat and simmer until the liquid is reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Let cool slightly, then return the rhubarb to the liquid. The sauce can be made ahead and refrigerated.

To serve, cut the cake into thick slices (I then halved the slices to make them look more like tea cakes.) Spoon a generous helping of whipped cream onto each piece, then ladle on some syrup with the small pieces of rhubarb. Don't be shy with the syrup: Let it soak into the cake.

Serve with your favorite tea or coffee. A nice dessert wine such as Essensia, the orange-flavored Muscat, would also be a good choice.

Happy Birthday, Tomeika!

Yesterday we celebrated our friend Tomeika's twenty-seventh birthday and my wife spent the day making Tomeika's favorite foods so we could enjoy a lovely meal together on the terrace.


The menu: crab cakes, macaroni and cheese, braised kale with bacon, followed by a German chocolate cake.


German chocolate cake happens to be my favorite as well and I'm told our 7-year-old daughter helped in the baking. At a certain point, she was instructed that some of the eggs needed to be separated. Her solution to that request was to begin placing eggs in different parts of the kitchen: an egg on top of the microwave, an egg on the kitchen table, etc. It sounds to me like the eggs had plenty of separation...


At this point I need to interject that my wife makes probably the best crab cakes anywhere. For those of you who think crab cakes are something pounded out with lots of bread crumbs, then tossed in a deep fat fryer until the resemble something close to a horse turd, I have news.


My wife makes her crab cakes much more in the style of Maryland's Eastern Shore, where the large pieces of premium crab meat are just barely held together with a little mayo, a little mustard and a little fresh bread crumbs (not the stuff out of a can). At the Captain's Table in Crisfield, they are made in just this manner--more a tall pile of crab meat than anything--then finished under a broiler. Or at least they were the last time I was there years ago.


My wife prefers to fry her crab cakes in a heavy iron skillet until they are just browned on either side. And, yes, they do sometimes want to separate around the edges, there's just no helping that.


One of our favorite places to eat in the District of Columbia is The Diner in Adam's Morgan. I should amend that to say this is one of the places frequently haunted by my wife, my daughter and our friend Tomeika, often as a group. They particularly favor The Diner's macaroni and cheese and my wife was shooting for something approximating that, but wanted all you readers to know that the recipe she used came from Martha Stewart's website.

This is a dynamite macaroni and cheese, with both sharp cheddar and Gruyere cheeses in it and a wonderful crustiness owing to the bread crumbs my wife made fresh from a rustic loaf purchased at Whole Foods. After assembling the dish she poured it into one of our ceramic ovals and baked it earlier in the day. Then just prior to serving she placed it back in the oven to warm and develop that beautiful brown top. My wife used a round pastry cutter to place rounds of macaroni and cheese on the plates.

Finally, it turns out Tomeika is a big fan of greens. But greens prepared a certain way, which is the slow, Southern way that just so happens to be my favorite way with greens as well. These greens in fact were the dark Italian kale I harvested and cooked some weeks back. While they were defrosting, I sauteed a quarter-pound of slab back, roughly chopped, in some olive oil. When all the grease had been rendered, I removed the bacon and sauteed a whole Vidalia onion cut into thin strips. Then I added back the bacon and about seven cups of chopped kale along with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and let everything cook very slowly in a heavy pot for about 45 minutes to meld all the flavors.

It's a long walk from the kitchen to the terrace. My wife plated the food restaurant-style and we walked the plates out there and had a beautiful meal. Our friend Darren joined us and we topped it off with the German chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and candles. I think Tomeika was pleased.