The Carrot Cake Mistake!

My mom's birthday was this week, naturally I made a cake. Like most times when I am inspired to bake, I take a look at the ingredients in the pantry before choosing a recipe. We happen to have a couple pounds of carrots, so I settled on a carrot cake. We also had a container of not-so-sweet blueberries, so I planned to make a blueberry frosting to accompany it.

Remembering a good recipe for carrot cake, I pulled out "The Fannie Farmer Cookbook", thinking it was in there. I couldn't find the recipe, but there was one called "Carrot Tart", which I decided to try. I should have closed the book and looked elsewhere for a recipe, but I felt adventurous.

Needless to say, the tart did not turn out well. It is impossible to know if I made one fatal mistakes when mixing the cake, or perhaps it was the combination of several smaller ones.

Here's where I went wrong:
1. I chose the wrong pan. The book specified a springform pan, so I grabbed the first one I saw (thinking we only owned one). It had a thick curved bottom. I should have chosen a pan with a flat bottom.
2. I used cake flour in the recipe when it did not specify what type of flour to use. When substituting cake flour for regular flour, the two are not proportional, and I did not compensate for this difference.
3. I decreased the sugar. The recipe called for 1 c sugar, 4 eggs, 1/2c flour and no butter. 1 cup sugar will make a very sweet cake, especially with so little flour. I suspect that the cake did need the full 1 cup sugar to appropriately rise and cook, while reducing this made the cake very dense.
4. I did not bake the cake long enough. I put the cake in for a minimum time on the recipe, and had my mom check the cake when the timer went off while I made frosting. She stuck it with a toothpick that came out clean, a sign that the cake was cooked. Had I checked the cake--knowing it could potentially cook for 10 more minutes)--I would have seen the top was not yet browned and the cake looked low, evidence to bake it the extra 10 minutes.

The makings of a failed cake

Whipping the egg whites

 

It was during baking that things seemed a bit off

The result: An undercooked, dense, super sweet, and mostly inedible cake. Baking it for less time in the wrong pan resulted in a partially-cooked batter. The denseness is due to reducing the sugar and incorrect flour measurements. Since the cake still tasted too sweet, I concluded that this was simply a bad recipe. I should have taken the extra 2 minutes to check another recipe book before deciding on the tart.

Disaster!

What did I do to resolve the situation? I made a chocolate yogurt cake! This cake is so simple and delicious, I knew I could depend on it in a crunch. I opted to make a completely chocolate version--less sweet than the standard vanilla cake. It was perfect with the very sweet blueberry buttercream frosting I had whipped up.

Ta-Da!! And the birthday is saved.