CARROT CAKE REVIEW No 24 - Smoke & Mirror Cakes

 


Waitrose - Carrot & Passion Fruit Cake

I understand its difficult to make even a half satisfactory carrot cake in a factory. A true carrot cake is a highly unsuitable recipe for mass production. Its not a sponge cake, its generally heavier than most cakes and hence can be unpredictable in its outcome and cooking time. This is why factory produced carrot cakes invariably turn out to be just spiced sponge cakes, incurring my wrath and wither because, like a drug addict, they can't stop themselves from breaking Golden Rule No 3. Cake makers,  whether in a factory or in a cafe kitchen, can resort to smoke and mirrors, giving a carrot cake an exotic sounding name or ingredient and sticking marzipan carrots on it - they look like a carrot cake - but they're not even a short stroll away from being one.

So this Carrrot & Passion Fruit Cake from Waitrose was low in my expectations before I even snapped my lock down eroded dentures around it. They've branded it so because it sounds unique and sun kissed and not your common carrot cake found sweating under cling film on the stall of a Summer Fayre. Yet on the first bite you could be forgiven for wondering - 'So where is this Passion Fruit then ?' Turns out, in actuality, its only a very minor ingredient. Basically just a squiggle of passion fruit curd forming a double wavy line, like a pelmet, around the edge of the cream cheese frosting.  Smoke and mirror cakes dear readers, classic smoke and mirrors!

But!....Yes!!...a cream cheese frosting!!! - that'll shorten its shelf life. How do they produce a cream cheese frosting so thin yet stiff enough in consistency not to either sink with a pock marked grey drizzle into the cake or slide drunkenly off it? You would really have to scour the ingredients list looking for gums. That said, it was a recognisably cream cheese frosting and it caressed the cake with all the intimate fidelity of a life long lover. Touching perhaps, but not a passionate grapple on the croquet lawn.

Anyway, back at the cake experience. Well, unsurprisingly, it was spongy, but not so that it felt artificially pumped up. Carrots were higher up the ingredient list than you might expect, so the texture of the cake was more a light delicate rubble than an evenly whipped aeration. In terms of weight, well lets say it had cuddly love handles, lacking the expansive heft of a spare tyre swaddling its midriff. Plenty of sultanas moistening the mix. No discernible nuts!

If one were to overlook the smoke and mirrors, and I am on this occasion inclined to do so, it was not bad. For a factory produced carrot cake this made a passable approximation. 


CARROT CAKE SCORE - 5/8



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