Each holiday, for as long as I can remember, I would HIGHLY look forward to 2 major food groups that my Maw Maw would bring to holiday dinners: grains and veggies. Those special treats being fried cornbread and her homemade carrot cake. TO THIS DAY.. I cannot make fried corn bread like that woman. She even bought me my own flat, cast iron skillet like hers, but I just don’t have her special touch when it comes to corn bread. And up to today, I wouldn’t even want to talk about the carrot cake issues. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
For a few years, when I really started getting into baking, I would ask her for the recipe occasionally and she wouldn’t even really respond. She would just kind of look at me a smirk. Lol, thanks Maw Maw. Y’all, I’m telling you, it is the best carrot cake… and not just the carrot cake, but the cream cheese frosting. Nom. The cake is light (in texture and in color), carroty but not crazy orange, moist, and she always does thin layers. It’s kind of funny when I was younger, like in middle school and high school, every now and then I’d ask my mom if I could try to make a carrot cake from a random recipe I found (because Maw Maw wouldn’t share) and my mother would literally say, “Pooh, don’t even try.” HA! Thanks, Mom. Of course, I have tried, and my efforts were pointless. The cakes have been nothing like hers.
Anyway, years go by and last Thanksgiving I thought I’d bat my eye lashes a little more and try to get the recipe again. And folks— she gave in. I think she forgot that she had been keeping it from me all of these years. Do you know what she told me, I will never forget, “It’s just any old carrot cake recipe you’d find in a cookbook.” I didn’t know if I should be mad or laugh! Here I am, curiously baking all these years and it’s just any old recipe?! It’s not like some ancient family recipe passed down from generation to generation?! Lol. The best part is she told me she uses a recipe (which I am sure she now has memorized and does not reference) from a cook book my mother has, Cooking in the Cove, a local recipe book. Naturally, I was a bit shocked. A couple days later I decided to look for the recipe in the book and of course there’s like 5 different carrot cake recipes!
My Maw Maw reads my blogs and today when I had to run down the street to her house to get cinnamon for the cake (thanks again!) I told her what I was making and she smiled. So Maw Maw, now I hope you really understand how much I want to be able to cook like you. I love you. xoxo
I do the fancy plop the icing all on the top and spread it all around technique.
The cake turned out good. I doubt I’ll ever make a carrot cake and be able to say that it turned out great, simply because I’ve had the best. But, if you’re out there and don’t have a Maw Maw’s carrot cake to compare it to, it’s definitely worth baking :).
Pecans in the frosting, because that’s how we eat cream cheese frosting on carrot cake in the South.
Here is the link to the recipe, give it a shot! It really is good, very moist: Scrumptious Carrot Cake.
the end.
girlgonenom 