It’s the season for gift giving.
Here’s an idea: Gift a snacking cake. Your gift will be as unique as it will be delicious.
This recipe is adapted from a recipe in Chetna Masan’s great cookbook, The Cardamom Trail. You can find the book at your local bookstore or on Amazon here. The book’s target subject is baking both sweet and savory foods (many of them European classics) with spices ranging from cardamom to cloves to tamarind and fenugreek. These were the spices traded centuries ago along the ancient trade route often referred to as “The Cardamom Trail.”
The cookbook’s author, Chetna Masan, was a Great British Bake-Off contestant. She was born in India but currently lives (and bakes) in Great Britain. In the forward to her book, Makan explains that she often takes a classic European recipe and adds Indian spices like cardamom to mix things up. This, for example, is a delicious “take” on traditional carrot cake.
The cardamom spice used in this recipe, if you are unfamiliar with it, is the world’s third most expensive spice–after saffron and vanilla. Indigenous to India, the spice was grown only in India until around 1900 when German immigrants exported it to Guatemala. (Guatemala is now the world’s major producer of the spice.) Today, according to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, a significant percentage of the world’s crop is consumed in Arab countries (for Cardamom coffee) and by Nordic countries where the spice is used extensively in baking.
If you are really a fan of this spice (as I am), here is a link to an interesting 7-minute video about cardamom growers in India: Cardamom Production in India. The harvesting of the spice is difficult and crops are increasingly threatened by climate change. That means, of course, that the world’s third most expensive spice is likely to get a whole lot more expensive in coming years.
Here is the recipe for Carrot and Banana Spiced Cake as I prepared it in my kitchen and a link to the original recipe on the author’s web page: Carrot and Banana Cake.
Carrot and Banana Spiced Cake
Ingredients
- Cake Ingredients:
- 7 oz. unsalted butter (softened)
- 7 oz. light brown sugar
- 7 oz. grated carrots
- 1 ripe banana (mashed)
- 1 t. ground cinnamon
- 1 t. ground cardamom
- 7 oz. self-rising flour
- 1 t. baking powder
- 4 eggs (separated)
- 2 oz. walnuts (chopped)
- Frosting Ingredients:
- 9 oz. mascarpone
- 2 T. powdered sugar
- Chopped walnuts for garnish
Directions
- Step 1 Grease a 10 inch square baking pan and line it with parchment. Let the edges of the parchment hang over two sides of the pan. Use those pieces of parchment as handles to help you lift out the cake when it is done.
- Step 2 Cream the butter and sugars together in a large bowl or in the bowl of your stand mixer until the mixture is fully mixed and fluffy.
- Step 3 Add the grated carrots, mashed banana, cinnamon and cardamom to the butter mixture. Mix until combined.
- Step 4 Add the flour, baking powder and egg yolks to the butter mixture. Mix until combined.
- Step 5 Put the egg whites in a large bowl and whisk them until they form soft peaks. Fold the whipped egg whites into the batter. Fold the 2 ounces of chopped walnuts into the batter.
- Step 6 Spoon the batter into the prepared pan smoothing the top of the batter. Bake at 350 degrees F. for about 50 minutes. When your cake is done, it will spring back when you press the top of the cake and a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake will come out clean . Remove the cake from the oven. Let it sit on your counter for about 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, take the cake out of the pan and let it sit on a rack to cool completely.
- Step 7 While the cake is cooling, make the icing. Combine the mascarpone and the icing sugar. Stir the mixture until you have a smooth icing. Spread the icing on top of the cooled cake and sprinkle chopped walnuts over the top of the cake.
- Step 8 This cake is best eaten at room temperature. If you have leftovers, store them in your refrigerator.
