Claire Saffitz Makes Carrot and Pecan Cake | Dessert Person

do not give me a piece of carrot cake if it doesn't have cream cheese frosting there is no carrot cake that i want to eat that doesn't have cream cheese frosting hey everyone i'm claire saffits welcome to my home kitchen today i'm making a recipe from my book dessert person and it is for one of my favorite layer cakes in the book it is a carrot pecan cake it has obviously fresh carrots a bunch of pecans some fresh ginger in it and it has a brown butter cream cheese frosting which is so delicious not to be missed and it is an amazing celebration cake it is not that complicated not that complicated [Music] i love carrot cake that is obviously not a unique um or novel position but i have just strong memories of carrot cake growing up my mom had has these two community cookbooks from cleveland one is called box lunch and one is called bach for more but it's bach as in johann sebastian because they're from like the cleveland symphony orchestras you know like booster club or whatever it was and like they're the i love community cookbooks also like in that in that cookbook she has little handwritten notes in the margins and the mar the note just says like this recipe has too much oil but it's like maybe tell us what the right amount of oil is instead of just being like this is wrong anyway so i think like there's a lot of those kinds of recipes that maybe we've had in childhood and they set the benchmark for what a that you know that recipe should taste like so for me it's her carrot cake and this is my interpretation of that cake but with the right amount of oil like a lot of layer cakes this recipe calls for a stand mixer you could make the cake with a hand mixer although i think you won't get something as light in texture three eight inch cake pans other than that it's using stuff that you probably have in your kitchen you need a box grater for the carrots a bunch of bowls spatula of course there's carrots there's vanilla the oil instead of butter all the kind of usual hallmarks of a carrot cake but this recipe also includes buttermilk i mix it with the grated carrot i also have brown and white sugars i have a bunch of spices i like a combo of cinnamon ground ginger and ground clove also some fresh ginger that i'm gonna peel and grate you'll see like walnuts a lot in carrot cake i actually really like using pecans i think pecans and all those warm spices and all those flavors go really well flour eggs you know you've seen all this stuff before [Music] because i want my nuts to be cooled when i add them to the cake i'm going to start first by toasting them and then while i get everything else together they can cool so a cup and a half of pecans so those are going in a 350 oven i'll leave my oven on 350 for baking and i'll set a timer because it is unbelievably easy to burn nuts while the nuts are toasting the first thing i want to do is grate my carrots i remember being yelled at in culinary school for peeling carrots too slowly as fast as humanly possible and i was like well this is as fast as i go it was just a dick i would just be like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do that i thought i wasn't i wasn't like going that slow am kind of going slow okay so i'm going to start grading with skinny carrots like this i'll actually do multiple at a time don't be a hero when you get down to the nub just get rid of it it's not worth grating your knuckles that's my pecan timer i think they could go a little longer maybe another minute or two all right so i'm getting rid of my little carrot nubs i'll feed it to my goat this is going to be my wet ingredients so to this i'll add my buttermilk buttermilk is at room temperature everything that's out is at room temperature two teaspoons vanilla extract and now i'm gonna do my ginger in here so i need a tablespoon oh my god how long has it been so much more than one minute wow just in the nick of time oh god i'd burn these all right so i really well toasted my pecans i'm gonna get these onto a different tray so that they don't continue to toast these such a cool i think they're fine i i got them just in the nick of time back to the ginger so basically use a spoon and kind of hold it like so and then just a scraping motion to take the skin off so i don't really care that much about getting every last bit so i'm going to grate this here is my tablespoon measure so now i just want to stir this get all that ginger incorporated and i'll let this hang out while i finish all the prep so like the pans the dry ingredients all that [Music] i want to make sure i can unmold the layers easily and with no issue with nothing sticking so i always line cake pans with parchment paper the way that i usually prefer is just to actually trace around the pan and cut the circle and then i cut inside of the line to account for the thickness of the sides so i'm giving it maybe like an eighth of an inch so there's the round and it fits comfortably inside the pan so now i just want to grease the pans because you want the parchment to stick to the pan so that's you know like a light drizzle of oil so once you've coated it go ahead and lay your parchment round down and then you have your prepped pan ready to go [Music] now i'm going to put together my dry ingredients and the first step of doing that is to pulverize my toasted pecans so here they've been cooling i just want to say i'm i'm quite happy with the level of toast on them they are very very brown so putting them inside of a bag you could process them in a food processor but as we've covered extensively i sort of have a weird dislike of getting out my food processor i also kind of like this step because it's fun so just press out the air so this part is just doing this and i want it to be like fine but i'm not trying to get the finest of like almond flour from the store because i'll be here forever i just want things to be well broken down into something you know coarse meal i really like that there are some larger pieces and then some really really fine pieces that's all good i like all of that variation this is where we're going to mix our dry ingredients so this is all-purpose flour i have kosher salt baking soda and baking powder then ground clove ground ginger ground cinnamon i mentioned that we're starting with the whisk attachment and that is because the first step in this cake as is often the step in any oil-based cake is to actually whip the eggs and the sugar and that's because we're not using butter so i'm not starting with that creaming step or i'm incorporating a bunch of air into that butter sugar mixture instead i'm going to incorporate air by whipping the eggs with the sugar and making it super frothy so i have four large eggs at room temp three quarters of a cup each of dark brown sugar and then three quarters of a cup granulated i'm going to start this on low i want to break up those yolks and get it all smooth this will aerate and lighten until we get something called ribbon and i'm going to show you what that looks like and in the meantime this just needs to beat for a little while i'm going to turn up the speed to medium high so obviously the texture has totally transformed it is light airy thick all right let me show you what i mean by the term ribbon you'll often see the phrase slowly dissolving ribbon which is my favorite phrase in all of recipe writing language so basically the mixture falls off of the whisk or the attachment whatever you're using and back onto itself and it creates this kind of like it creates a ribbon i don't know how to describe it so now with the mixer running i'm going to start streaming in the oil and i want to go slowly so that they emulsifies too much oil too quickly can overwhelm the eggs okay so now we have the oil added this is the point at which i'm going to change from the whisk attachment to the paddle and now i'm following the basic tenant of cake making which is wet and dry ingredients alternating so three editions of flour two of the wet starting with dry and ending with dry the remaining wet mixture which is the second half and then the remaining dry ingredients carrot cake is usually a rather liquidy batter it's not like a thick fluffy batter like you see often with like a yellow cake or something so that's normal so just give the sides a scrape a little bit just give it a couple turns let's talk about the crazy stuff that people put in their carrot cake i i don't categorically dislike raisins i actually like raisins or i think we should call them sun-dried grapes in savory applications like in pilafs or braises i don't love it in baked goods so i choose not to add raisins to my carrot cake they are optional if you want to go ahead and add but i really don't endorse things like crushed pineapple or like sweet and shredded coconut i think there is a time and a place for those i just don't want them in my carrot cake that's just to me is it's kind of a different thing all right so now i'm going to use my scale to weigh out the same amount of batter in each pan and it's 595 grams or one pound five ounces i have a rack in the upper third and a rack in the lower third but the idea is to stagger them so you don't want a pan to bake directly above another pan because it's going to block the heat so i'm going to arrange them two spread out and one in the middle so i'm going to go this guy on top and then the other two below and staggered so they're off to the sides now because of where they are the two below are closer to the side of the oven and that just means i want to rotate because they're going to bake a little unevenly so when you're baking layers rotating is always a good idea so i'm going to switch the positions of the layers and also give the pans themselves a little turn all right so these will bake for about a half an hour we'll come back i'll show you what they look like when they're done [Music] cream cheese frosting philadelphia cream cheese and let me just extend that concept of like i don't want carrot cake without cream cheese frosting i don't want carrot cake without cream cheese frosting made with philadelphia not spawn cotton i just really like philly cream cheese so i have a pound of it here two eight ounce packs room temperature okay it's very important with any frosting that everything is room temperature because i am trying to mix cream cheese and butter and if the butter is slightly colder than the cream cheese the butter will won't quite mix in and i'll end up having like little butter pieces in there which i don't want i want it to be smooth and light and lump free but first i'm going to do one free step which is browning the butter i have my saucepan right here i'll start on medium high to get everything melted and then up to a boil and then as that water boils off i will moderate the heat and kind of turn it down the thing about browning butter is make sure you give it a stir fairly often and i'm using a flexible spatula because you want to scrape the sides so that no milk solids start to stick to the bottom or sides all right let's check let's check this guy which i think is done so here you can see super even beautiful surface she is done you know it's funny with carrot cake you'll really start to see if your oven isn't level because like the cakes will be slightly tipped to one side because the batter is kind of liquid done and we're boiling like i've said in the past i have to actively try not to put brown butter in basically every recipe this is one application where the brown butter is really the star and you get this awesome combination of like tangy delicious cream cheese and super toasty caramelized butter and like it's the best frosting felix kitty what's he all turnt about like what yeah yeah yeah all right so i can tell that this is going to start turning brown pretty quickly because those like big boiling water kind of bubbles have given way to a smaller like foamier kind of bubble so i just know that that means that most of the water is gone if you're on like a pretty high heat like anything medium or above go ahead and turn it down so once you're like that looks good for brown butter i have a really really deep golden color um that's when you probably want to take it out of the pan if you've timed yourself perfectly you can let the butter rest in here and it will carry over just enough that you have that optimal brown butter point but if you had a lot of heat under it it will it will actually burn if you leave it in there so i often transfer out of the pan just to make sure i'm not going to overshoot the mark i'm going to pour this into the bowl of the stand mixer and now see all those golden bits basically i want this butter to solidify again we don't have all day so i'm actually going to mix it over an ice bath just to get it to set and cool off completely i can't tell you how great it is to have an ice machine i mean living in new york apartments makes you so grateful for things that i think in other places are like considered fairly standard like a dishwasher so this will cool down the butter pretty quickly so this will start to thicken you'll notice that it's thicker i don't know how else to describe it and as soon as it starts to kind of go opaque is when i'll stop stirring it looks so cool here is the butter i stirred it over the ice until it was opaque but not cold and not hardened so you can see it's still soft i'm going to add my cream cheese on set my uh the food styles for my book a friend named astrid astrid is gluten free and so she couldn't really try most of the things that we were making because only a few recipes in the book are gluten-free but she wouldn't just like go home at the end of the day with like a half pint of frosting and just eat that sorry astrid i hope you don't mind that i shared that story the point of that story was you can just eat the frosting and i just want to get this on low to mix it all together and get it smooth so that mixture is smooth i'm going to add my vanilla bean so you can use extract i do think this is a time to splurge if you have vanilla bean they are very pricey but it adds such fantastic flavor so i'm just scraping down the length of the pod and it's extracting all of those seeds but because vanilla is so precious vanilla only grows within 50 miles of either side of the equator and also like climate change is affecting its growth so i like to save the pods i don't want to waste any part of it and i just add it to my little jar of homemade vanilla it still has work to do to that i'm adding a generous pinch of kosher salt and this recipe just uses an entire one pound bag which seems crazy but it makes a lot and add all of it if i were to turn this on it would just you know like blow it up into a cloud in my face so i pulse the mixture to combine everything and the towel just keeps it from like flying everywhere and so now that the sugar has really disappeared now i can start to beat it i just feel very grateful to like the pastry goddesses that cream cheese frosting is one of the easiest and also the best all right so this is almost done this is our cream cheese frosting because we brown that butter this frosting has a tendency to be a little bit loose in consistency so if this frosting won't hold its shape and won't hold a peak see that peak when i flip it over see how it doesn't really hold this is a little bit loose so it's going to be difficult to frost a cake with this because it's not going to hold its shape i find that the best method is to just put the whole bowl in the fridge but where where in the fridge all right so i'll just give that a stir every few minutes and then we'll move on to making our cake [Applause] so this is the frosting that we let chill a little bit it is definitely thickened a bit it'll hold a soft peak like so cake frosting and decorating can be i mean it is an art absolutely but it's all up to you about how far you want to take it you know at its most basic cake cake frosting just requires a offset spatula or even like a butter knife and that's it i'm going to put it on this cake stand and in order to protect the stand from getting messy and sticky with frosting i cover it with strips of parchment paper like so so here are my parchment strips now i cut around with my little offset spatula just to make sure there's no sticking around the sides just to give it something to kind of adhere to put a dollop of frosting in the middle of that plate and that helps to keep the layer from sliding around peel off that parchment this obviously is a generous amount of cream cheese frosting which is the only way to make cream cheese frosting i'm going to start by putting about a cup of frosting down just going to spread this amount of frosting across the surface all the way to the very edge so i'm actually just going to then just place it on top so now i like to get eye level with the cake i'm looking for a couple things i'm looking at the layers are lined up and like stacked one on top of the other i'm also looking to see that the top is level and so then give it a spin see that the sides are aligned you can kind of shift it over a little okay so another cup or so of frosting now the last layer on top okay that looks pretty good we've stacked our layers they're filled now we are going to move on to a stage called the crumb coat a crumb coat is basically a very thin layer of frosting and then when you go to put the real layer frosting on top those crumbs are not going to get mixed into your frosting so you need very little for this a lot i learned a lot of cake decorating for youtube many many many years ago i decided to do something totally unhinged and make a wedding cake and then i was like i don't know how to make a wedding cake so i watched a bunch of youtube videos and it's super helpful but at the same time without any like real formal training i think there's probably a lot of tricks that i don't know so i've just sort of taught myself to do it in a way that makes sense to me so for all those cake artists out there i defer to your expertise this is ready to go into the fridge after a crumb coat it's always a good idea to give it a little time in the fridge so it can chill and start to set oh yeah yeah how am i gonna do this this is always my problem well i have four quarts of cookie dough ah oh god okay another tip make room in your fridge before you start this step oh my god and actually i'm gonna leave that space in there because i'll probably throw this cake back in the fridge when i'm done just so that final layer of frosting can fully set i go really natural with this cake and i just kind of let it be like swirly and loose and and not like one of those perfect finish cakes so i'm just gonna work this frosting down the sides so again like it's easier to actually remove frosting than to put more on so putting on more than you need is fine okay so this is the frosting i actually think it's a it's the right amount i just want to kind of go back in and give it some more texture so this is also the kind of the point where like you could just sit here and keep going over and over and over at some point you just gotta be like i'm good with this this cake is glistening it's a little warm in here i'm gonna pop this one back into the fridge and then and then we get to kind of eat it so there's the cake i love the swirls i think it looks great slide the parchment underneath there is kind of an art to like cake slicing make sure that you are going straight down sometimes what i end up doing is like i think i'm cutting down but i'm kind of cutting at an angle and i also cut a little bit past that midway point of the cake and that enables me to get like a nice sharp points but like sometimes the first slice just doesn't come out looking great and that's fine i mean not to toot my own horn is the best carrot cake i've ever had the perfect texture the right amount of carrot and spice and all those 90 pecans but truly the thing that makes this cake is the frosting all right who doesn't love carrot cake it is ideal for like any occasion unless you're cooking for a one-year-old's birthday party in this case he might hate it elliott obviously i haven't forgotten thank you for watching i love showing you recipes from dessertperson there'll be more to come in the meantime i will be here eating my cake thank you for watching hey everyone it's claire i want to thank you for watching me bake from my cookbook dessert person there's another book i want to show you by fellow penguin random house author melissa clark this one is called dinner in french you probably know melissa's work from the new york times she's been making recipes on our dinner tables for years and this is her spin on classic french recipes but with a real modern uh fresh twist such a beautiful book super practical for home cooks so check it out wherever books are sold and thank you for watching

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 1,110,627

Rating: 4.966085 out of 5

Keywords: Carrot Cake, Cream Cheese Frosting, Carrot Cake Recipe, How To Make Carrot Cake, Claire Saffitz, Claire Saffitz Makes, Gourmet Makes, Bon Appetit, Dessert Person, Dessert, Claire Makes Carrot Cake, Carrots, Cake, Frosting, Brown Butter, Layer Cake, Cake Decorating, Easy Recipe, Claire, Holiday Baking, Baking, How To Cook, How To Bake, Cake Frosting, Cream Cheese, Moist Carrot Cake, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, Best Carrot Cake, Homemade Carrot Cake, Cake Recipe

Id: ou3zj0R0Gus

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HeyPaisan]

love claire and i love carrot cake. Glad some of the former bon appetit people are finding success.

[u/Unleashedgenius]

Her book is awesome. If you don't have it I highly recommend you pick it up.

[u/HobbitFuckingCorpses]

Damn these are some unhinged ass comments

[u/PM_ME_UR_Jumanjihole]

Love Claire, but I can't get over the Doug theme music. Honk Honk

[u/CyonHal]

15:45

Astrid wtf

[u/LaterGatorPlayer]

claire is a snack, and she’s so talented.

[u/that_one_guy_with_th]

What ever happened to Sohla?

[u/storiqo]

the cake it's looks delicious