Carrot Cake sans Carrots

Happy Easter and Happy Spring! If, by chance, you’ve just been visited by the most famous rabbit of all (and I don’t mean Bugs) you might want to take a moment to reflect on the Big Bunny’s favorite food – The Carrot. Here’s a little carrot trivia to crunch on:

• The carrot originated in Afghanistan, but the varieties grown there were purple and yellow. The ubiquitous orange root didn’t come until later.



• Both the ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated carrots.



• In 1607 the settlers at Jamestown in Virginia introduced carrots to North America.



• Thomas Jefferson – who loved vegetables – harvested 18 bushels of carrots at his Monticello home in 1814.



• The state of California is the top producer of fresh carrots in the United States.



• The carrot consists of 87 percent water.



• Beta carotene gives the carrot its orange color, and the carrot delivers 30 percent of the Vitamin A in the U.S. diet.



• One cup of raw carrots contains about 50 calories, 4 grams of dietary fiber, 6 grams of sugars and over 400 percent of a single daily serving of Vitamin A.

None of these nutritional benefits are present in this whimsical Carrot Cake inspired by a recipe in the April issue of Food Network Magazine. It contains absolutely no carrot, and while the original recipe recommends purchased frozen pound cake and tub frosting, I decided to make a vanilla pound cake recipe and a batch of cream cheese frosting from scratch as the base ingredients for the recipe. Once that’s done, the rest is basically a kitchen craft project of trimming and frosting the cake and precise alignment of dozens of orange jelly beans.

I suspect there’s enough sugar here to assure I’ll be hopping down the bunny trail by late afternoon.

©2011 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved