This past weekend was our special two-on-one with Miss V and we had a blast!
Like last time with P, we catered the weekend to what she likes best of all, like building legos, doing our nails, playing at the park, and baking.
We watched tv in the hot tub and stayed up late with hot cocoa.
I’ve had this carrot cake recipe bookmarked literally since the day it was published back in 2018. Which may sound insane to some (slash most) people, but I think there are others out there like me…are you guys out there?? It’s kind of like a book list right? Only instead of novels, it’s with recipes.
Let’s get one thing off the bat right off. This recipe is not for a week day mom trying to home school her kids. It involves a lot of ingredients (mostly normal things you’d have on hand anyway, but it’s decidedly not a minimalist recipe).
Also, it uses every appliance and – even for people like me who clean as they go – leaves you with a lot of dirty dishes.
I warned her that it was highly involved and would take us all morning and she was down. So off we went!
While the cake was baking, Kyle took her outside to play tennis/baseball at the park behind our house. After that we tackled the frosting.
I made some swaps in the (dairy heavy) frosting recipe, using Earth Balance, Green Valley organic lactose free cream cheese, So Delicious plain coconut yogurt, and Lakanto powdered sugar (replacing the dairy butter, dairy cream cheese, dairy greek yogurt, and regular powdered sugar). Full disclosure, I wasn’t super keen on the monkfruit sugar swap, but went with it because (a) V was shopping with me and had a random 5-year-old NEED to buy the blue bag over the Wholesome brand (regular) sugar I normally buy and (b) the cake already had 1 1/4 cups of brown sugar so I figured trying a sugar alternative for the frosting would be fine.
My review is as follows: use regular sugar.
And now that I’ve made it seem like a ghastly ingredient, let me back track a bit and assure you, the frosting was still wonderful.
I realize the icing work looks ATROCIOUS and I’d love to blame it on my kiddo, but alas, it was my own handiwork. News flash, I’m not a pastry chef!
I tried to cover the top in walnuts to distract from the “rustic” look, but it is what it is.
Anyway it was FREAKIN delicious. I’m not a cake person, which is why it may strike you as odd (or not?) when I say this was one of the best cakes I’ve ever tasted.
V didn’t really like the frosting (it had a tang from the plain yogurt), so I will either get most of the cake to myself or she will just eat around the frosting. Although that may be hard considering there is a middle layer between the two levels.
I’m not mad about splitting a cake with Kyle. There are worse things. 😛 It pairs perfectly with my afternoon ginger tea.
Pingback: Pizza and burgers – Hungry Hungry Hippie