Sweet Pea Journey

Family, Friendship, Food, Fun and Everything in Between!

Tagged: cake

Cooking

Best Carrot Cake

I have to confess, this is not the healthiest cake you ever had. The truth is, it is probably one of the worst, sugar and fat content wise. But, it got 4 giant carrots in it, so I am good. Also, this recipe is easy, doesn’t require tons of bowls and tools.

 

 

Wet Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 1/4 cup vegetable oil

1 1/2 cup sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

 

Dry Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

3 tsp ground cinnamon

4 large carrots, grated

1 cup chopped walnuts

 

Frosting:

1 box (8 oz) cream cheese

1 stick butter

2 cups powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

 

Method:

 

Pre-heat oven to 350 deg F. Spray and flour a 9 x 13 inch baking dish.

In a large mixing bowl, mix all wet ingredients together. I still have not found my handy dandy hand mixer, so I did this cake by hand. If you have a hand mixer, definitely go for that!

Peel and grate carrots. This will take some time and muscle. I think I got my right arm work out for the day. I did not really measure the carrots, just eyeballed it, probably a good 3 cups.

Add all dry ingredients into wet, leave carrots and walnuts to later. Mix the batter until no more lumps. Stir in grated carrots and chopped walnuts.

Pour batter into the prepared 9 x 13 baking dish. Bake at 350 deg F for 50 minutes. Let cool completely.

 

For frosting, soften cream cheese and butter, mix thoroughly. Add vanilla extract and mix. Add powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, using a spoon, carefully mix powdered sugar into cream cheese and butter mixture. Frost cake and serve!

 

Cooking

Ultimate Blueberry Cake with Lemon Syrup

Fresh blueberries are in season y’all!

Go pick some fresh blueberries with your little ones and make some killer dessert with them! I take my kids pick blueberries every year, since my oldest was one and a half years old. Let me tell ya, every year, we pick 30-40 lbs of fresh blueberries, come home, sort out the biggest and juiciest and freeze them in sandwich or quart size Ziploc bags and freeze. These berries last a whole year of desserts, smoothies or just as a simple super healthy frozen treat!

For now, I will focus on the Ultimate Blueberry cake with Lemon Syrup. It’s a huge hit every time it’s made.

Wet Ingredients:

3 large eggs
1/2 cup canola oil 1 tsp vanilla extract (please buy a bottle of the real stuff, makes a huge difference in your dessert)
1 cup Greek yogurt

1/2 cup sugar (with 1 additional TBSP sugar for syrup)

Dry Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour (and additional 1 TBSP flour if you are using frozen berries)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Star Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of fresh or frozen blueberries
2 large lemons

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 350 deg F.

Grease, flour and parchment paper your loaf pan. I used a 9x5x3 loaf pan, even though it’s non-stick, I still did this step. I had a loaf stuck in my pan before, so, don’t skip this step!

In a medium bowl, whisk all dry ingredients together.

Add all wet ingredients into a larger bowl. Zest your lemons at this time, zest goes into wet ingredients bowl. Save your lemons, you will need the juice later.

Whisk wet ingredients together with the same whisk (I really don’t like introducing more tools to wash, unless I absolutely have to.) The lemon zest and vanilla extract smells so good at this point, you know you will have an amazing cake in the end already!

Slowly add all dry ingredient mixture into wet mixture, that’s why you want to mix the wet ingredients in a larger bowl. You have no idea how many times I used the wrong size bowl, and ended up with a mess when I bake. Ha, lessons learned, pay attention before dirty up a dish, figure out which bowl will end up having all the ingredients together in the end.

The mixture will be a sticky mess, but kinda cool looking.

In a smaller bowl, mix your blueberries and that 1 additional TBSP of flour, this prevents the berries to bleed too much into the batter, and helps them stay afloat during the baking process and don’t sink to the bottom.

Gently fold berries into the batter. I recommend using a rubber spatula for this, scrap the sides of the bowl as you go, try not to poke the berries.

Pour the batter with berries into your prepared loaf pan, and smooth it out a tiny bit.

Into the oven it goes. Now it’s the time to wash all the dirty dishes and tools and walk away.

Come back in about 50 minutes and check on your cake. If a clean tooth pick comes out clean from your cake, leave it in the loaf pan to cool at least 10 minutes. If the toothpick doesn’t come out clean, stick the cake back into the oven and bake for 10 minutes more.

While the cake is cooling in the loaf pan, juice your naked lemons into a small pot, add 1 TBSP sugar and stir on medium heat until sugar is dissolved.

Transfer cake onto a plate, poke some more holes on the cake with the tooth pick, this will help the cake to absolve the lovely lemony flavor of the syrup. You guessed it, slowly pour syrup on the cake while cake is still warm.

Slice up and enjoy!

Cooking

Tres Leches Cake – Speedy Version

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this recipe. It’s super easy, literally no work at all. And the recipe and process is so easy, that I only followed the recipe the very first time. The best part of it? The cake is SO delicious, my kids prefer this cake over fancy expensive professionally made birthday cakes since 2 years ago! However, before you promise your little one you will make this cake for them, make sure tell them it’s going to be ready tomorrow, because the cake needs to sit in the fridge over night to soak up the milky goodness.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

1 box of store bought yellow cake mix (yep, that’s a great start, isn’t it?)

Eggs, vegetable oil and water as required by the yellow cake mix box instruction

 

For the tres leches part:

1 can of sweetened condensed milk, any brand

1 can of evaporated milk, any brand

2 cups of any kind of milk you have in your fridge, or a mixture of milk of what you have. Can’t be simpler than that! I used half and half, heavy cream, 2%, whole, fat free, soy, almond, coconut milk…

 

If you want to go fancy and want to cover up imperfections:

1 can of whip cream (or you can whip heavy whipping cream, which I think is actually worth the effort)

2 cans of fruit jam / spread of your choice (I made strawberry jam myself this time. It’s my son’s birthday after all)

 

How to:

Follow the instruction on the cake mix box and bake the cake. Use either 9″ x 13″ pan, or 2 off 8″ pans (especially if you want to gift one and keep one, and you will be GLAD you kept one!) Pay attention to the different time required to bake the cake, based on the baking dish size.

After the cake is done, take it out of the oven, leave on the stove top to cool (I am not a cooling rack person, and always seem to lose mine anyway) for roughly 10 minutes.  Use a wooden spatula, or small rolling pin, poke the cake all the way to the bottom, literally every 1 inch distance or so. Don’t worry about the look of the cake, you will either keep it for your family, in which case, trust me, everyone will devour the cake and no one will pay attention to the look of the cake, or, you can cover it up with the whipping cream.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and whatever milk you have on hand. The third kind, don’t stress too much about the quantity, a bit more a bit less doesn’t really matter. That’s another reason why this is my kind of recipe. Make sure scrape the bottom of the bowl with your whisk, the sweetened condensed milk tends to stay at the bottom, way longer than you may think it would. Have fun with this process, put on your favorite music and dance a little, it won’t hurt! Or, you can recruit your little helpers, they always love this part.

Carefully pour the milk mixture onto the poked cake(s). Divide evenly, if you are baking 2 cakes. It may seem like the cake(s) are swimming in the milk mixture. Don’t panic, the milk goodness will be all absorbed by the cake, and the cake will be so luscious and soft, and melt in your mouth.

At this point, I normally cover the cake with plastic wrap and stick them into the fridge and fight the urge to taste it. Next day, take the cake out of the fridge, slather the fruit jam / spread and cover with whipped cream. I promise you, proper dessert is served!

 

Alterations to the cake:

In the cake mix, add a can of drained and pressed crushed pineapple, use coconut milk as the third milk, you have your piña colada version cake

You can add a can of any sort of chopped fruit, very well drained into the cake mix

At the bottom of the baking dish, sprinkle brown sugar, arrange rings of pineapple and put a cherry in the center, dump the cake batter on top and follow the rest of the recipe – fancy pineapple upside down cake version

The changes are endless, let me know what you did with this, I’d love to try your version too!