The tandem recipe will be up later this week!

Back in the early part of this year (before his birthday in May), Fred saw a recipe entitled “Best. Carrot. Cake. Ever.”, and sent me the link to the recipe at Baby Gizmo, asking me to make it for his birthday. I did, and we both agreed that this cake is SO FRIGGIN’ GOOD that we (and by “we” I mean “I”) would be making it many more times.

Of course, the first time I made it I failed to take pictures of it, so y’all have been without this fantastic recipe due to my inadequacies as a food blogger (I almost referred to myself as a “food blogger” without rolling my eyes. ALMOST, I say. Okay, I didn’t even come close – I rolled my eyes so hard I got dizzy and almost passed out.) Last week was Thanksgiving, and when we were tasked with the job of bringing dessert to Thanksgiving, this is the cake that came immediately to mind.

(We also brought Sweet Potato Casserole and sauteed kale. I don’t have a recipe for the sauteed kale. It’s kale. You saute it. DUH.)

Firstly, gather your ingredients. These are just the ingredients for the cake part itself – there’s a whole other picture of the ingredients for the buttermilk glaze, and then a kind of half-assed picture of the ingredients for the frosting. (Why whole-ass it when you can half-ass it, I always say!)

Flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, eggs, sugar, vegetable oil, buttermilk, vanilla, shredded carrots, crushed pineapple, flaked coconut, chopped walnuts.

But wait! Before you make your cake, you must line two round 9-inch cake pans with wax paper, then lightly grease them. I don’t know if y’all know this, but the best and easiest way to line cake pans with wax paper is to lay the cake pan on top of the wax paper, trace around it with a pencil, and then cut just inside the line. Voila! Perfectly sized! I greased the pans with Baker’s Joy spray, because it’s easy.

Stir your dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon) together in a bowl and set it aside.

Then beat your eggs, sugar, oil, buttermilk, and vanilla together until you have a smooth batter. Add the flour mixture (beat it on low, because you don’t want that shit to scatter everywhere). Fold in the carrot, coconut, pineapple, and walnuts (by the way, I expect that pecans would work pretty well in this recipe, too.)

Divide the batter between your two prepared pans, and bake. Now, here is where I ran into an issue. The recipe says to bake for 25 – 30 minutes or until a wooden pick comes out clean. It took 43 minutes for my cakes to be done. Checking the comments of the original recipe, other people ran into that same problem, so the printable recipe at the bottom is going to tell you to bake your cakes for 40 – 45 minutes.

While your cakes are baking, it’s time to make the buttermilk glaze. The ingredients:

Sugar, baking soda, buttermilk, butter, corn syrup, vanilla.

Throw everything but the vanilla in a heavy pot over med-high heat. Bring it to a boil, stirring every now and then. Once it’s boiling, boil for 4 minutes, stirring often. It’ll get all bubbly and turn a golden brown color.

When the four minutes of boiling is up, remove it from the heat, and stir in the vanilla.

When the cakes come out of the oven, pour the buttermilk glaze over the cakes. I used about 2/3 of the glaze – just cover each cake with a nice, thick glaze but don’t flood them.

Leave the glazed cakes in the pans on wire racks for 15 minutes. Then remove the cakes from the pans and let them cool completely on the wire racks.

Now here’s a tip from me to you – when you dump the cakes out of the pans, immediately turn them back over so that they’re top-side (sticky-side) up. Otherwise, the top of the cakes are going to stick to the wire racks and you’re going to be SO annoyed.

If I had flipped this over, there would have been 75% less cursing in my kitchen when it came time to frost the cake.

*Note: the original recipe has you slice each layer in half, so that you end up with 4 layers. I didn’t do that, because I didn’t think it was necessary. You can do it if you want to, but I don’t really see the point. Ordinarily I’d be like “you get more frosting in each piece that way!”, but no. It’s pretty perfect with two layers.

Once the layers are cool, time to make the frosting! Ingredients:

Softened butter, softened cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla.

Beat the cream cheese and butter together until they’re creamy. Add powdered sugar and vanilla, and beat until smooth. Add more sugar if need be – I ended up adding about another 3/4 cup of sugar before it was at the consistency I wanted.

Slap down one layer and frost it…

Then the second layer.

Fred was in charge of the frosting because I had other shit to do. I suggested that he color the frosting and pipe a little carrot on top to show everyone how fancy we are, but he didn’t do it. Hmph.

So. Friggin’. YUMMY. And it was a hit at Thanksgiving dinner!