Passport & Plate - Brazilian Carrot Cake
Brazil | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 5 photos
Ingredients
For the Carrot Cake:
4 medium carrots
1/2 cup of vegetable oil
2 cups of white sugar
3 eggs
3 cups of all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon of baking powder
A blender for mixing
For the Milk Chocolate Sauce
2 cups of milk
10 tablespoons of hot chocolate powder or chocolate syrup
2 tablespoons of butter
4 tablespoons of sugar
How to prepare this recipeFor the cake:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
1.Start by peeling and chopping your carrots roughly into inch-sized chunks. This will help the blender break it up better, making a smoother cake batter.
2. Grab your blender, throw in the carrots, the 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, 2 cups of regular white sugar and 3 eggs.
4. Blend everything for 4-5 minutes until the batter is smooth. If you can still see sugar granules that haven't dissolved, let it blend a little longer!
5. In a bowl, combine the 3 cups of all-purpose flour with the baking powder.
6. Once your carrot mixture is ready, pour it into the bowl of dry ingredients.
7. Incorporate the wet ingredients slowly. Be careful not to over-mix-- the baking powder can lose it's strength and your cake won't rise as well. A steady folding movement is best.
8. Grab a rectangular or square cake pan, approximately 9 x 9 inches.
9. Grease the bottom of the pan and then flour it, making sure all sides corners and sides are coated.
10. Pour your cake batter in the pan and put it in the oven.
11. It will bake for around 40 minutes, depending on your oven.
12. The carrot cake is ready when you can stick a fork in the middle and it comes out clean!
Milk Chocolate Sauce Topping
1.In a medium sauce pan, add milk, chocolate powder, butter and sugar.
2. When the mixture melts and starts to boil, lower the heat to a simmer.
3.Leave it simmering and reducing, stirring every now and then for 20-25 minutes.
4. Let it cool before pouring atop the cake.
The story behind this recipe As a Brazilian living in Canada, I get tired of being told what or how to eat. Some things are personal, like religion or politics—not dinner party conversation. Lay off the salt, they say. Your sugar intake is too high. When they won’t leave me this, the one piece of identity that I have left as an immigrant, I turn to carrot cake.
This is not a political, frosted, North-American carrot cake loudly passing judgment. This is the cake made early morning by my maid Lulu in Brazil, on a day so hot that without the head start it might never cool on an open window. It’s a cake still found within the social realm of childhood, and the surprise of coming home to an after school treat.
It’s the cake for our working mothers, with no connotations of servitude from their stand-ins. It won’t be handed to you as you lounge around ringing a bell, but earned by outside playtime, homework and putting away belongings. It urges you to wash your hands without a word of instruction. It is simple sweetness and nurture.
It is a tired, hot quietude at the table and where would my freezing adult self retrieve to were it not for Lulu? She stays resourceful in the kitchen of my memories, never using a peeler for the carrots, gliding a knife through its skin with ease. This cake does not understand ‘third worlds’; all it has is a borrowed blender, so that will have to do.
When you eat it—bite into the phosphorescent orange slice with its sludge of chocolate sauce atop it, you realize culture is just a whisper. I refuse to feel bad for any of it. The flour, eggs, and sugar always whisper in Portuguese, they offer that simple sweetness and nurture, asking if I’d like another slice.
