Carrot Cake Is... well...

I made two suppers that involved carrots, leading to:

Where the hell did all these come from?

Therefore, A Book of Cookrye will feature a lot of carrot cakes in the near future.

I've always found carrot cake to be kind of "eh...", but that's because every time I have one the damn thing's stuffed full of walnuts. Besides, today's recipe came from a south Louisiana Junior League cookbook. That's almost a guarantee that the recipes will be perfect! Right?

From The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

All right, every time I make a cake with oil in it it comes out tasting like a disappointing cake mix. But if anyone knows how to cook right, it's southern Junior League ladies.  I hope.

This recipe was really easy at least.

Cracking an egg one-handed while getting my #$%^%$ phone camera to go off at the right time was surprisingly satisfying.

Either that's mixing the eggs and oil or the start of a really greasy breakfast.

I don't feel like spending forever rubbing carrots over a cheese grater.

Spices and soda.

Sugar! Now it tastes like a spice cake and I only had a few (and maybe some extra) spoonfuls.

Now it's good for you.

Carrot lumps.

At this point, I have to stop and say that at this point I had my first misgivings- the raw carrot shreds in the batter taster terrible. But I held out hope that the ladies of the Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana couldn't possibly steer me wrong. Presumably the carrots cook themselves in the batter and it'll all be good by the time were done. However, this is the first cake I've made when I didn't eat the batter. It baked all right, but the top was really sticky so I put it under the broiler to make it dry and crisp on top.

....and here's where I finally listen to my doubts about the Junior League's infallibility. This thing was really gummy on the inside.

The cross-section looks like paste mashed into a pan.

And what's with that white stuff on the bottom? I didn't put flour in the pan.

...on second thought, I don't really need to know.

But I didn't want to throw away a whole damn cake I'd just made, so I cut it and layered it with paper towels. The next day when I decided to try it again, I saw this:

I've never had so thoroughly fat-soaked paper towels outside of Chicken Express. That's some serious window to weight gain shit there. And to make things worse, it actually had matured into a really moist cake overnight so I couldn't mutter that it sucked and chuck it. I gave it away instead.

I feel like the gods have let me down. I mean, this is a Junior League cookbook from Louisiana! How could they steer me wrong? But as long as I have surplus carrots in the refrigerator I'll be trying more carrot cake recipes. Stay tuned...