Tropical Carrot Cake

When my friend Sarah wrote that she was looking for a good carrot cake recipe, it occurred to me that I don't really have one in my repertoire. My family was never big on carrot cakes, so I never got one passed down from Granny or any of my baking aunts. But not wanting to let Sarah down, I went on a hunt for something a little different. I figured everyone had a standard carrot cake recipe, but I wanted to find something that I hoped would make that wedding cake she's working on a real showpiece.

It wasn't long before I came across a reference to a now-absent entry in 101 Cookbooks for this tropical carrot cake, which originated in the pages of Bon Appetit. Not being huge carrot cake eaters, I resolved to make the recipe into cupcakes I could take to my dessert-starved coworkers. 14 people devoured 30 cupcakes in a couple of hours, and I got thumbs up all the way from them.

That said, here are some of the notes I sent Sarah about my experiment with this recipe, just in case you try it yourself:

• This cake is oily. It calls for something like a cup of oil - not unusual in a carrot cake, but it left greasy stains all over the place.
• The frosting is something to behold - it's creamy and beautiful - but the addition of Coco Lopez (coconut cream) is a little lost on me. It calls for 3/4c of Coco Lopez in addition to a little bit of coconut extract. I didn't have any coconut extract (and I refused to buy it because I'll likely never use it on anything else) so I used the Coco Lopez only and I couldn't really taste the coconut in the frosting. So it seems a bit like a waste of money for very little effect.
• I used dry roasted unsalted macadamia nuts - I'm not sure that's easy to get, but I'm also not sure if that affected the flavor of the cake because it has very little salt in it otherwise. 
• I also used unsweetened large flake coconut instead of sweetened shredded coconut, and that probably took some of the sweet away in the cake, which was really fine with me.
• Lastly, the frosting was so soft that I had to refrigerate it before piping it onto cupcakes - and then I had to stick them all into the freezer because they were melting quickly. The frosting's temperature-sensitive and started to droop a bit, and that might be because of the coconut cream (Coco Lopez). Otherwise it was pretty stable.

This is a nice cake. It's not overly carrot-y, and I like the moisture that the pineapple gives (and the tart contrast). Even though we may not make this often, it's definitely a recipe I'll refer to again!

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