Happy Saturday, DinnerCakes readers!
Today’s Kitchen Tip I learned just a few weeks ago at a cook-out. I got into a discussion about baking with the wife of one of my husband’s friends. She told me a great story about carrot cake!
She and her husband had another couple over for dinner, and she unwrapped her freshly baked carrot cake to get it ready for serving. She cut into it and noticed that there were green flecks throughout the cake! She knew it couldn’t be mold because she had just made it. One of the dinner guests thought she had put some zucchini in the cake.
Yikes! How many of you would have died from embarrassment like she felt?
It turns out that the only thing she did differently this time as opposed to in previous cakes was that she left on the outer layer of the carrot. She washed it of course, but she included the whole carrot rather than removing that top layer.
I did some googling and it looks like she’s not alone. Quite a few people have suffered the green speckled carrot cake phenomena. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, though. Some sites get extremely technical talking about the oxidation of the carrots. Other possible explanations I found were that sometimes if carrots are pushed above the soil when growing, the sun may turn them greenish, and that overbaking could also make them yellowish.
The bottom line is that you should peel off the outer carrot skin to be safe, and watch your cake to make sure that you don’t overbake it. If anyone comes across a more definitive explanation (in layman’s terms!) please let us know!
Tags: kitchen tips
