At some point in my life I am going to use a recipe as written. I don't know when this will be, but it will happen. My husband had asked for a carrot cake for his birthday cake. This recipe was from the interweb, plucked at random because the accompanying photograph looked good. The amount of oil in it was concerning at the time, and when I peeped in the oven half way though cooking I could see bubbling oil! It was not an appetising sight. This led to an experimentation with some of the ingredients and quantities.
This is the current recipe:
195g gluten-free SR flour
2 level tsp ground cinnamon
200g dark brown sugar
120ml vegetable oil
120ml apple sauce
3 eggs
270g grated carrots
90g chopped walnuts
The recipe called for 270ml of oil, and I used 120ml, and 120ml of apple sauce. In the next incarnation of this recipe I will add in some apple juice for additional moisture, bringing it back up to the 270ml level rather than 240ml.
Whilst baking, I discovered that there was no castor sugar in the house, but there was dark brown sugar. This has a better taste, so I used that instead. However, the original recipe was a bit too sweet, and with the inclusion of apple sauce, I decided to reduce the amount of sugar to 200g. This would be fine for a cake that is going to be iced. We didn't apply cream cheese icing, and so it wasn't quite as sweet as I would normally like my cake to be. Next time, I'll probably use 250g of sugar.
We've had walnut problems with this cake - there's been none in the house! The first time through I used pecans, and rather nice they were too. This time it was almonds. But we like walnuts. If I could just drill into people's heads the different between things in the baking cupboard and general snacks I would be able to bake with walnuts!
