Carrot Cake XII: Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon rolls in with root vegetables

Get out the cheese grater and the root vegetables, because carrot cake is back!

Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon Carrot Cake ⅔ c sugar ⅔ c water ½ c raisins 1½ tsp butter* 1 large, finely-grated carrot ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp cloves ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp salt 1¼ c flour ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp baking powder ½ c chopped walnuts, if desired Mix sugar, water, raisins, butter, shredded carrot, spices, and salt in a large saucepan. Cook over high heat until they start to boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer for five minutes. Remove from heat, put a lid on the pot, and let rest 12 hours. (Note from the original: Why they get so tired is a mystery, but if you don't rest them, the mixture loses something in taste.) While you're waiting for the pot of carrots to rest, mix the flour, baking powder, and baking soda. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round pan or a loaf pan. Mix the flour, baking soda, and baking powder into the saucepan of simmered carrots. Then stir in the nuts if desired. Spread this into the pan and bake 30-45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This is good served warm. *You can substitute vegetable shortening or margarine for a vegan cake. "Wonderful Good Cooking" from Amish Country Kitchens, 1974 via Grannie Pantries

This recipe comes from our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker, who posted it not too long ago. If you haven't read her blog, go over and have a look at Grannie Pantries! She writes about the many community-compiled cookbooks where half the recipes begin with "open one can (undiluted) of soup" and end with "top with shredded cheese and bake until bubbly." She shows, in detail, the recipes (good and bad) that daily graced countless dinner tables for many years, but that no "culinary expert" ever deemed worthy of documentation. She also writes about the long and lamentable wheat-germ-and-carob years of health foods, documenting the trials and the punitively bland miseries that some blessed people endured in the name of nutrition. And she gets full credit for expounding on the subject of desserts that are also salads if you serve them on a lettuce leaf. 

You may wonder why we're making a sheep wagon carrot cake (whatever that is). After our stovetop went out, we had to remove the oven to fix it. This meant that while the oven was not broken, it was nonetheless out of order. After we got the oven back in the wall, I offhandedly asked what we should make to commemorate its return to service.

I enthusiastically pass the blame for this particular carrot cake onto the person who, staring at the carrots that occupied far too much refrigerator space, said "You know, I've never had a carrot cake..." And no, I didn't prompt anyone. I hadn't even mentioned the existence of carrot cakes to anyone in the house.

The carrot cakes are baaaaaaaaack!

For those of you who aren't familiar with my baking history, for a few years an inexplicable number of carrots appeared in my refrigerator whenever I wasn't looking. I didn't go out and buy them, but they showed up anyway. This led to me shoving them all through a meat grinder and making a long succession of carrot cakes.

The nonchalant solicitation for a carrot cake led to an uncalled-for rant about how I once had an onslaught of carrots and tested more carrot cake recipes than anyone should make. Although I started my little tirade at a normal volume, my voice started bouncing off the walls as I informed everyone in the kitchen and in the house next door that most carrot cake recipes are pasty, gummy, and terrible- which is why there was no pandemic-induced carrot cake craze to go with all the banana bread renaissance. (For the only good "normal" carrot cake recipe I've found, see here. Or try this delightful lemon-carrot cake here.)

Unfortunately, once carrots start taking over the refrigerator, you can't get rid of them with just one cake, although the first one I made was happily short-lived. This brings us to Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon Carrot Cake.

One carrot makes a lot of confetti.

When I saw the recipe, I thought it looked like a War Cake with carrots in it. With that in mind, I also have a theory about why you're supposed to rest the carrots for twelve hours even though the recipe writer says it's a mystery. The war cake recipe tells you to boil the first few ingredients (just like we're about to do with Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon) and then let the pot cool all the way to room temperature before adding the flour. The war cake recipe says it's "very important" to cool it completely. Perhaps Great-Grandma decided to make a war cake and also get rid of some unwanted carrots.

I once was impatient and added the flour to a war cake when the pot was still lukewarm. The flour promptly clumped up. Even after I gave the batter an extra-hard spoon-thrashing to break up all the gelatinous flour-lumps, the cake just did not taste right. You really do need your pot of boiled ingredients to be completely cold if you want your cake to come out right.

While the carrot and its new friends simmered, the kitchen smelled like I had a spice cake in the oven and vegetable soup on top of the stove. But as you can see, the boiled carrot shreds looked unpromisingly stringy and sad after taking it off the burner. Perhaps I am a bit wary after making so many dud carrot cake recipes, but I was already preparing to tell Great-Grandma to roll her sheep wagon right back where it came from.

True to the recipe's directions, the pot took about twelve hours to get to room temperature. However, after twelve hours I was ready for repose. While the pot of boiled carrots and raisins may have enough sugar to keep it from going off for an extra day, I didn't want to risk it. So I put the room-temperature saucepan in the refrigerator to wait safely in the cold until baking time.

I hoped the boiled carrots would look better the next day, but they did not. The raisins plumped up and looked a bit jauntier, but everything else looked just as brown, stringy, and ruined as it had the night before. There also wasn't a whole lot liquid left in the pot. While I had earlier thought that the recipe didn't have enough flour, now I wondered if it used too much of it. I expected to have a lot of crumbly flour clay with carrot shreds in it. But after a good stirring, we had a well-mixed boulder of raw carrot cake.

Don't worry, it spread into the pan with some gentle yet firm spoon encouragement.

After baking, the cake was so firm I feared it was ruinously dry. I immediately poured cinnamon icing on top in an attempt to counteract the dryness. I needn't have worried. Upon cutting it, the cake came out perfectly nice, surprisingly fine-grained, and-- wait for it-- moist, once we cut into it.

As we were eating this (the second carrot cake in three days), one person asked me "So what is the point of carrot cake? Because this is basically a spice cake. Is it to get rid of carrots? Like, what do the carrots do?" 

I don't know the answer to the first question. Maybe the carrots in carrot cake are like the blueberries in muffins, and are present only to help you delude yourself into thinking that a cake is healthy. Or maybe a lot of people wanted to just do something with the excessive carrots that spawned in their kitchen like they do in my refrigerator. 

If you are hoping to turn a bevy of unnecessary carrots into dessert, Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon Carrot Cake will not help you. This entire cake contains just one carrot. Pick a recipe that will use more carrots per cake. But Great-Grandma's Sheep Wagon Carrot Cake is a really good spice cake. True to its name, the recipe tastes like something you'd have gotten from your great-grandmother.

It's also really good with ice cream.

If you want a vegan carrot cake recipe, you could easily use vegetable shortening or margarine instead of butter in this recipe. Since the cake only uses a small spoonful of butter, substituting it won't change the taste at all. To my own surprise, we're going to add this to the list of good carrot cake recipes. It's not merely  "good as far as carrot cakes go," it's just plain good.

Penuche Applesauce Cake: or, You'd never believe this is carrot-free

You know how very recently, we modified a cake recipe to use strawberries instead of applesauce? The original recipe was so intriguing- especially since it had an awful lot of ground raisins in it. I've never seen a recipe where you grind raisins. What the heck do they do to a cake?

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

Penuche Applesauce Cake ½ c water 2 c sweetened applesauce* 1 c raisins 1½ c sugar ½ c butter or margarine 2 eggs ¼ tsp baking powder 1½ tsp baking soda ¾ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp cloves ½ tsp allspice 2½ c flour ¾ c (3 oz) nuts, chopped† Heat oven to 350°. Grease and dust with flour a 9x13 pan. (For this cake, you want the extra insurance against sticking, so be sure to dust the pan with flour.) Put in a blender the applesauce, water, and raisins. Thoroughly liquefy. Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices. When mixed, switch from a spoon to a whisk and beat in the eggs. Alternately add the flour (in three additions) and the blenderized mixture (in two additions), starting with the flour. Fold in the nuts. Pour into the pan and bake until done, about 45-50 minutes. If you're strictly following the original recipe, cool the cake and then ice it. I dumped the icing on right out of the oven and tilted the pan until it was coated. That way the icing kind of melts into the very top of the cake and is so good. Easy Penuche Icing: ⅓ c butter 1 c brown sugar ½ c cream Powdered sugar Put butter and sugar in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, add cream, and cool to lukewarm. Add enough powdered sugar to make it a spreading consistency. It'll be easier to beat out lumps of sugar if you transfer the brown sugar mixture to a small bowl first. *I used unsweetened applesauce because it was cheaper. The recipe came out fine. †I used hazelnuts, though I suspect someone making this recipe in 1968 would have used walnuts. Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968 Submitter: Mrs. Gloria Shaw; Sedan, KS (Chautauqua County Fair blue ribbon winning recipe)

I had another reason to make this recipe: it's an excuse to get out my one and only wedding present!
I haven't bothered to get married. Indeed, I am the oldest person in my entire extended family to be neither married, engaged, dating, or even merely seeing someone. That is not an exaggeration. I am so single my brother got married and gave me the blender. So if you are so single that you post baby pictures of your houseplants online, worry not! If you truly believe, wedding presents will come your way.

SINGLEHOOD POWERS ACTIVATE!

Not knowing just how well-ground Mrs. Gloria Shaw of Sedan, Kansas wanted the raisins to be, I ran the blender until not even the tiniest flecks of skin remained visible. After all, there's no doing it like overdoing it. Incidentally, the raisins didn't change the taste of the applesauce nearly as much as I thought they would.

Only one task remained before we could get to the mixing of the cake. Most happily, it involved using a meat grinder!

Insert a joke about nuts in a meat grinder here.

Rarely do I ever successfully plan things ahead when in the kitchen. But indeed, every ingredient that needed prior preparation had been properly prepared, and we were ready to proceed! Things were going very well until I reached in the refrigerator for the required two eggs and instead found my carousel of progress coming to a whiplash-inducing halt.

Do you know how much side-eye one receives from going grocery shopping in batter-spattered clothes?

Had I halved the recipe, we could have been at this point half an hour ago.

At this point, we had what tasted like a perfectly good (if somewhat salty) spice cake. Seriously, this recipe uses a lot of salt for just one cake. I'd have cut back on how much  I added except that apparently this recipe won a blue ribbon at some county fair in Kansas. Therefore, if I ended up with a cake that tasted like someone spilled seawater on it, I could blame some county fair judges from the last millennium.
But enough of that. Let's bring on the blenderized raisins!

BLORP.

As a recipe note, it seems that sweetened applesauce is considered outdated now because the store didn't have very much of it. And what they did have was kind of expensive. Anyway, we now have this big pan of cake batter!

Unsurprisingly, this tasted really good.

Those who were traumatized by raisins you thought were chocolate chips will be glad to know that you really couldn't taste their presence. Though it occurred to me: between all the butter, the raisins, and the nuts (not to mention what goes in the icing which we haven't gotten to yet), this must be one of the most calorie-dense cake recipes ever perpetrated on A Book of Cookrye. As I stirred in the nuts, I wondered if this was a fairly representative specimen of the food one would have found in Mrs. Gloria Shaw of Sedan, Kansas' household. And if so, could any of the men in the family see their belt buckles in a mirror?

Right, let's get all this in the pan! Like the last time we used this recipe, this proved to be a lot of cake batter.

With the cake in the oven, we decided to ignore the dirty dishes and instead get the icing ready to go. The icing uses brown sugar, butter, cream, and in general looked like one of the richest icing recipes I've made in a long time. However, for reasons known only to herself, Mrs. Gloria Shaw of Sedan, Kansas has us using almost but not quite a whole stick of butter.

Thank heavens we weren't supposed to put this in the icing, because that would have made it fattening.

With that said, if you can resist sampling a pot of this, not even allowing yourself a dainty dip of the spoon, you have no soul.

To save dishes, I tried to finish the icing in the pot. This resulted in chasing powdered sugar lumps with a whisk until I accepted the reality of more things to wash and got out another bowl. The result: insanely delicious icing.

One of the nice things about cakes with ludicrously long baking times is that you can get the icing done and all the dishes washed before removing them from the oven, thus eliminating that dread of the impending cleanup. And behold how delicious the cake looks!

And so, we dump icing on. Unlike last time, absolutely no attempts at decoration were made.

What, you think it looks bad? Let's just tilt the pan a few times to get a more even coverage.

It may not be the most attractive icing job I've ever done, but at least it doesn't look ugly. Uninspired, yes, but not ugly.
I brought this to a party and everyone liked it. However, they all thought it was a carrot cake. It's the weirdest thing, but this really does taste like it has carrots in it. It tastes like the best damn carrot cake you'll ever make. This is the carrot cake you'd make for someone who swears they hate carrot cake (as a bonus, you can then say "Surprise! There's no carrots in it!"). Those with whom I left the leftovers informed me that as a further bonus, this cake does not dry out. And so, in conclusion, if you are not on a diet this week, make this cake.

Carrot Cake XI: Now with pineapples!

Carrots keep ending up in the Book of Cookrye kitchen. Sometimes it feels like some divine force decided it is our purpose in life to try every carrot cake recipe we can find. I can think of no other reason these would have wound up in our hands.

As previously mentioned, our school is hosting a lot of summer camps. They usually leave out any surplus lunches so that starving engineering students may help themselves. We would like to point out that you're daft if you expect a swarm of nine-year-olds to be contented with baby carrots. And these are the sad, runty-looking skinny baby carrots, too. Our point is, we're not surprised there were leftovers, and (having peeped into the classroom) we are not surprised the kids did not exactly look happy to spend a day at junior engineers' camp. It may not have been the lunches, though. As soon as people come into the engineering building and that distinct smell of unwashed grad student hits them, you can see their moods deflate. Perhaps even children are subject to misery by osmosis, especially when you corral them into a windowless classroom with way too many fluorescent lights. Sometimes I want to go in there and tell them to change their career plans or this is their future.

On that cheerful note, we present...

Carrot-Pineapple Cake 6 tbsp butter 1 c sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda Cinnamon to taste (be generous) ½ tsp vanilla 1 c flour 1 (8-oz) can crushed pineapple Shredded carrots to make 1½ cups (about 6 oz) Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour* a round cake pan. Drain the pineapple† then measure it. Add enough finely shredded carrots to make 1½ firmly packed cups. Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs thoroughly. Add the baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and vanilla; mix well. Thoroughly mix in the flour. When all is mixed, stir in the carrots and pineapple. Spread into the pan and bake 30-45 minutes, or until it springs back when lightly pressed in the center. *This will want to stick to the pan regardless of how well you spray it. If you just throw a handful of flour into the pan and shake it around until coated, you'll be glad you did. †The easiest way to do this is to press the top of the can into it until the excess juice has been squeezed out (don't squeeze it completely dry, but you don't want it to be swimming in juice either).

We've perpetrated ten carrot cake recipes so far. Of those, we've found exactly two that were good. One of them was really easy, the other one involved grinding up a lot of almonds. We've done a lot of hunting online for new recipes, but most of them seem to be variations on this one, and pan after pan of cake-like paste gets old quickly. This isn't a new recipe so much as a suggestion we got: someone told us that carrot cake is a lot better if you replace part of the carrots with pineapple.

Those who let the pineapple juice go down the drain are missing out.

Maybe it's masochism, but the more failures we get from making carrot cakes exactly according to recipe directions, the more we want to see if yet another recipe will be any better. So many people keep making carrot cakes, yet so many are so bad. We have a 20% success rate with carrot cakes. We've wondered with ever more confusion why do so so many lousy carrot cake recipes keep floating around?

Speaking of paste, did you know how cohesive crushed pineapple gets once you've gotten all the juice out?

We at A Book of Cookrye have inadvertently made a lot more carrot cake recipes than anyone in their right minds would do, and our trained eyes told us that this one might actually be good. If not, the carrots were really bland and pathetic; therefore, we didn't waste any particularly good produce.

Looks like a geological core sample, doesn't it?

Speaking of flavorings, did you know that while Americans use cinnamon nearly exclusively in desserts, Indians almost never do? At least, that's what one of my friends from India told me. Cinnamon in India is used in spicy foods, not sweets. You just never know what is unusual about your country until someone brings an outside perspective. This makes me want to find a not-dessert recipe using cinnamon just to see how it works.

Does anyone else see a wide-eyed, gasping face?

The only thing that left us uncertain was putting cinnamon and pineapple together. But you know, if that's the worst a recipe can throw at us, it's not even trying. I mean really. If you're going to try to frighten me with a scary recipe, you'll have to come up with something worse than heavily sugared kidneys. And honestly, I actually liked those. So, the point is, cinnamon and pineapple is odd, but I've seen stranger things and eaten the leftovers.

Oo, it's pretty and swirly...

Incidentally, we're for once not using real vanilla. We used to scoff at the imitation stuff, but reading some of the more level-headed arguments on the subject led us to decide that spending extra on this is pointless. We at A Book of Cookrye will save our funds for when the genuine article either tastes better or actually provides some form of sustenance. Using imitation vanilla instead of the genuine article never gave anyone a vitamin deficiency they didn't already have coming. (However, it is a lot stronger than we're used to; adjust the amount you add accordingly if you switch over.) Besides, even if you think real vanilla is a lot better, wouldn't you rather save the good stuff for the recipes you're dead certain will be good?

Most carrot cakes are just spice cakes with extra vegetables.

Our opinion at A Book of Cookrye: the artificial stuff tastes a lot more like people's idea of vanilla. Think cherry-flavored things vs. actual cherries- only nowhere near as different. Oddly enough, imitation vanilla seems to be sweeter than actual vanilla. Then again, we didn't subject ourselves to a blind test, so we could be talking hokum. The two might be identical to those who are completely unawares.

Don't ask me why, but I found this to be a lot more amusing than it should have been. The carrots and pineapples have begun advancing over all previously unconquered territory...

Resistance is futile.

 Actually, it doesn't look too bad once it was spread around. Or have we at A Book of Cookrye made so many carrot cakes we're numb to the sight? Also, you could barely taste the pineapple in the batter.

This baked into something surprisingly delicate. You know how you can test cakes by seeing if they spring back when you try to make a dent in them? We had to press very lightly to test this one.

As for the results: We never thought we would have a use for the phrase "subtle use of pineapple." This tastes like spice cake. Sure, you can tell there's pineapple in it, but neither it nor the carrots are particularly strong. One of my friends thought it was just a cinnamon cake. It's a really good spice cake... with subtle use of pineapple.
In conclusion, I'm astonished to report that this carrot cake recipe is actually good. Seriously, try it. 

Carrot Cake X: This time with mayonnaise!

Did you think we at A Book of Cookrye were through with carrot cakes?

Carrot-Mayonnaise Cake 1 c sugar 1 c mayonnaise 1½ c shredded carrots 1 tsp baking soda 2 c flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a round cake pan. Mix sugar and mayonnaise. Stir in the soda, and when that's mixed in add the flour. When all is mixed, stir in the carrots. Pour into the pan and bake until a knife in the center comes out clean, 30-45 minutes.

There's just something about carrots that makes me want to put them in a meat grinder. Although why we keep trying carrot cakes is a mystery. For the record, we have to date tried nine and only two have been good: the really easy one and the one that involves grinding almonds.

It's the satisfying things in life.

We're not just using a little bit of mayo. This cake calls for a great big blob of the stuff. This is not as daffy as it first seems. There are actually a lot of mayonnaise cakes floating around. Since mayonnaise is mostly eggs and oil, apparently you can just substitute it right in and have cake.

The stray carrot shards make it look even worse.

Normally, one sees this at the beginning of one of those artery-clogging casseroles. You're supposed to add your canned soup, vegetables, and whatever else to the mayo and bake until bubbly. Well, vegetables will be involved in a minute. But first...

We have mayo-sugar sludge! At this point, I had to pause cake-making to taste this and see if it's worth committing the rest of the ingredients. I have another carrot cake recipe and it has pineapple in it, so why am I making one with mayo? Did you ever realize how pungent mayonnaise gets when you have a really big bowl of it radiating mayonnaise stink rays?

To the surprise of literally everyone in the kitchen who tried what lurked in the bowl, it was actually... good. It tasted like what would happen if someone wanted to make a cheesecake and had about $3.25 for ingredients. At any rate, we at A Book of Cookrye decided we had it in us to stay the course.

If you didn't know the secret ingredient, you'd think this was going to be a pretty tasty batch of cookies.

All right, we have successfully(?) concealed the mayonnaise in a half-finished dessert. Let's bring out the carrots and ruin what we have just done!

We also put in the juice that dripped out of the back of the grinder as we turned the carrots into carrot shrapnel- it's the puddle that goes from ten o'clock to twelve thirty. Why does carrot juice look like sewer water? With that in mind, doesn't the cake batter look like a taste-tempting treat?

Despite containing more mayonnaise than a potluck's worth of tuna salad, this actually became a seemingly normal carrot cake.

What, you thought it turned into a nice cake? I said it ended up normal for a carrot cake (see example here). Therefore, it was a weird gummy cake-paste that turned paper towels clear after sitting on them for thirty seconds.

It didn't taste too bad, and getting the rest of it out of the pan made us at A Book of Cookrye consider making cake balls out of it. However, we did not feel like salvaging a carrot-mayonnaise grease ball. My hands were shiny from scooping it out of the pan. We might save this recipe for if we ever feel like we reeeeally want to bother with tediously dipping cake balls, but we didn't save the cake.

Cakes should not do this.

Second-Stab Saturday: attempting an edible Crocus Carrot Cake

Merry Christmas from all of us at A Book of Cookrye! To encourage gift-giving, we would like to share what we got our Mom. She really likes nativities, so we gave her one.

I used her printer to make it.

My parents also have one of these on the table. I'm not sure why since you can get your nuts shelled in our modern time.

We started to think "What might one do with so many almonds? Sure, there's this recipe which was absolutely delicious, but what is life if you already know if you're getting a happy ending? We wanted to re-attempt this carrot cake instead.

Crocus Carrot Cake Rub four good sized cooked carrots through a sieve. Add two tablesoons ground almonds, three tablespoons sugar, the grated rind and strained juice of half a lemon, the well beaten yolks four eggs, three tablespoonfuls melted butter and the whites of the eggs beaten stiff with a pinch of salt. Pour into a small baking tin lined with pastry. Bake in a hot oven until ready and serve hot or cold, cut in squares. "Woman's Page: How to Fight the High Cost of Living," Odgen Standard [Ogden UT], June 11, 1913 (p. 7) Source

As you can see, we removed one critical word from the recipe this time. Since the carrots were overcooked and tasteless last time, this time we would only cook them once. Also, we were going to use the almonds, but it turns out it takes a lot of them to make up a tablespoon once you've unshelled them. Instead, we dumped in a heck of a lot of almond extract. We also dumped in lemon extract because lemons are tedious to rind and juice.

From a business standpoint, I can see the appeal of nuts sold in the shell.

In the spirit of the original column, we decided to fight the high cost of living when we realized we lacked graham crackers for the crust and raid the box of Ritz crackers that I think were meant for some party tray or another.

Speaking of fighting the high cost of living, someone got some Depression glass molds and is selling bowls at the Dollar Tree.

We made it as you would a graham cracker crust. However, they salt Ritz crackers a lot more than my store-brand-buying self remembers them doing. The result did not taste good going into the oven to toast a little bit. Fortunately, it turns out no one had to eat it. You see, we have real potholders at my parents'. After having so long used folded newspapers to extract things from the oven, it was a bit too much of an adjustment.

WOMP WOMP.

This was probably for the best. We tasted one of the bigger surviving pieces and it tasted unnervingly like microwave popcorn. Do they put diacetyl in Ritz crackers? At any rate, we remade the crust with some significantly less salty saltines. It survived the second time.
Having remembered how thin and sad the crocus carrot cake was last time we made it, we used a smaller pan. Surprisingly, this did look to work to our advantage. Then we realized "They have spare pans around here!" and decided to put a foil-covered pizza pan under it and hope for the best.

The batter tasted like almond, lemon, and raw carrot shards. That didn't bother us. Having racked up some experience in carrot cake making, we no longer worry when the batter tastes like raw carrot. The crocus carrot cake did not spill over, but if it had I wouldn't have had to do any scouring.

Look at it! It's so pretty and swirly!

It looked even better sliced.

However, despite spending about 50 minutes baking before it was done through, you know what it tasted like? Lemon and almond and raw carrot shards. The first time I make this, the carrots come out overcooked. The second time they come out uncooked despite having nearly an hour to bake. I hereby declare Crocus Carrot Cake a failure of a recipe. Merry Christmas, everybody!