My Foods of Love Throwdown: Smoked Carrot Cake

At some point in early 1999 I was at the street car stop with a couple of friends after a birthday celebration, one of whom was Carol. We celebrated with a grocery store carrot cake and I happened to mention I made a fantastic carrot cake from scratch. Carol was enthusiastic about it and I offered to make her one. Time marched on, Carol and I got together, finally married and every once in a while this elusive, fantastic carrot cake I bake makes it into conversation but no further. It's been about 20 years since I made a layer cake with frosting and yesterday, I smoked one! :clap2:

Some of the ingredients.



As usual, I find it impossible to follow a recipe perfectly. Instead of 3 cups of grated carrots I used 4, instead of 2 cups of white sugar I used one cup of real Demerara sugar, in addition to the cinnamon called for I added mace, ground cloves, ground allspice, freshly grated nutmeg, pinched walnuts, raisins and I substituted a cup of melted butter for the oil. Okay, I pretty much made my own recipe, just found a base to copy a flour to baking powder to baking soda ratio. :doh:



Couldn't find any of my other 9" spring form pans so substituted the second one with a cast iron skillet. Worked pretty good, I used the CI next to the deflector and it protected the cake from burning the best I've seen so far. Good to keep in mind for my next layer cake.













In the smoker.



I didn't shovel or use the snow blower to pile that much snow against the house, it all fell there or was driven by the wind. I'll dig it out before we hit melting temperatures.



Smoked carrot cakes!





Now let's make frosting.













Middle layer of frosting.







Next is the crumb coat, a thin layer of frosting that is applied and set in the fridge. I used my outdoor fridge for that, and yes, it does look like a gasser, doesn't it?





Final frosting coat and voilà, Carol's Valentine smoked carrot cake!









I asked Carol the million dollar question: was it worth waiting 15 years for? She said, "YES!" :laugh:

We had our piece with fresh brewed dark roast coffee and it was great. I think the spice, vanilla and smoke flavours in the cake would have been great with my favourite bourbon but I had to drive so I won't be able to test that until tomorrow. All in all it was a delicious experiment and segue back to the world of cake making.

Thanks for looking!

If this looks like fun to you, why don't you check out the rest of the entries?
http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=180549

Your cooks look amazing, too! I'll read yours and the rest of the entry threads carefully tomorrow, can't wait to find out what everyone's been up to.

Diesel Dave said:

Dang that looks great and it's smoked :shocked: how.....what.......wow!!!!!

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Hey, Diesel, show this thread to your brother the baker, maybe he'll make one. I've discovered a few things about smoking pies, pastries, soufflé and cakes in my kamado: smoke a little cooler (minus 10 to 15%) than the recipe, smoke less time (about 20 to 25% lower temperature) than the recipe calls for, have 'one or two pans/CI/broiler pan with both sections' below the flour product and check for doneness more often near the end of smoking time. I have to be extra careful if my cake, etc. needs to be positioned over hot spots, flour products burn easily.

PappaOscar said:

I guess its true... you can smoke just about anything...

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Yep, did you see my cheese soufflé? That was the final frontier for me, if I could make a successful soufflé in a kamado (especially since I'd never made a soufflé before in my life) I knew I could make anything in my kamado I could bake in an oven.