CARROT CAKE REVIEW No 36 - The Tray Bake Equivalent of Posh Totty

Folks Coffee Co, Holt, Norfolk

Probably the newest cafe in Holt, let alone North Norfolk, Folks is developing a small scale Norfolk chain of cafes. One in Norwich, Blakeney and Heydon, now joined by this one here. Clean minimalist layout, light coloured tables with rather lovely bent wood pale rattan chairs, olive green table light, warm grey and white crockery. Folks Holt effortlessly nails the brief for a simply styled modern cafe. 

It also produces a very fine Oat Latte. The cake range, though often limited, is always well made. So I could confidently order a Carrot Cake, which was really, as ever, the ubiquitous tray bake. But this being Holt, it wasn't considered acceptable to produce a passably fine tray bake, it had to do everything but put brass knobs on it. 

So where shall I start in describing this tray bake? Well, what first attracts your eye is the huge amount of foof, the confected froth of stuff they put on top of it. Not just a Pecan nut, but also three small dimpled pools of a fruit compote, an extravagant scattering of lavender and wild flower petals, not to mention a handsomely generous thick cream cheese topping. All atop a small cube of dark coloured carrot cake that has heft, moistness, dried fruit, chopped nut, and more than enough grated carrot that it patently shows its strandy origins in the external texture of the cake. My God, this might just be the tray bake that ticks most of the fucking boxes I ever conceived of in my nitpicking pedantic imagination. Bar the one about tray bakes not being truly cakes, of course.

So glory alleluia! the darned thing tastes like a carrot cake ideally should. All the top stuff is not an unnecessary distraction of confetti, but genuinely complements the flavours of the tray bake beneath. A very good carrot cake like texture, not too weighty, not overcooked nor undercooked, not claggy or doughy, not too spicey or flavourless, or dominated by the taste of banana, not blandly unidentifiable. Not any of the things I frequently criticise grown up Carrot Cakes of actually being. This is probably the nearest a tray bake has come, so far, to fulfilling my stringent recipe requirements for a Carrot Cake.  Yeah, shame about the tray bake. But maybe I'll blur the edges a bit, and partially forgive that on this occasion.

    

    CARROT TRAY BAKE SCORE - 7/8

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