Carol’s Pineapple Carrot Cake

This is another Carol recipe.

If you’ve been reading a while you know the name; a good share of what I cook on repeat came from her. This is the one I make every holiday season, and it has never once let me down, which is a longer run than most things get.

It is not a fussy cake. That’s most of why it works. There’s no creaming, no folding egg whites into anything, no stand mixer required, no step where you hold your breath. You sift the dry, you whisk the wet, you fold them together, you dump in the good stuff, and you put it in a pan. It’s spicy in a way most carrot cakes aren’t (cloves and ginger and nutmeg all showing up alongside the cinnamon), and it’s heavy with carrots and crushed pineapple, so it comes out moist and stays that way. It gets better on day two. It’s gone by day three.

(The carrots go through a hand-crank rotary grater, which the internet will happily tell you is a useless gadget, hogging counter space. Mine puts a pound of cheese through in under three minutes and I have no notes.)

Now. I have made two changes, and I want to be honest about both of them.

Carol made this with walnuts, and that makes sense: she grew up in California, and California is walnut country. It was delicious with walnuts. It was delicious with walnuts in her kitchen for a long time before it ever got to mine. But y’all, I’m a Texas girl living in Georgia, and if a nut is going into a baked good in my kitchen, it’s going to be a pecan. That’s not a culinary argument, it’s a regional identity issue, and I’m not litigating it. (For the record, both of my states have a claim here. The pecan has been the state tree of Texas since 1919, and Georgia grows about a third of the pecans in this country. I am, nut-wise, exactly where I belong.)

The second change isn’t really a change, because Carol and I were in complete agreement on it: one cup of nuts is not enough nuts. Not for a full 9×13. The recipe says a cup. We both measure out the cup and then add a handful more, which puts it somewhere north of a cup and a half, and neither of us has ever regretted it. If you want to be precise about it, use a cup and three quarters. If you want to be like us, use a cup and then a handful.

I also add golden raisins, roughly three quarters of a cup, for no better reason than that I like them. Carol did not do this. Dealer’s choice.

What I haven’t changed is the oven temperature, and I want to talk about that for a second, because it’s the strangest thing on the card.

This recipe bakes at 360°F. Not 350. Not 375. Three hundred and sixty, which is not a number ovens are marked for and not a number any cookbook I own uses. I questioned it. Carol swore it was right. This recipe is at least sixty years old, older than I am, and it has been baking at 360 that entire time.

I could round it down to 350 and add a few minutes. I could push it to 375 and take a few away. Nothing catastrophic would happen either way. But that is exactly the kind of small sensible improvement that turns out not to be one, and a recipe with sixty years of not failing has earned the benefit of the doubt. So I set the dial between the marks and I leave it alone.

There’s one more thing that came with this recipe, and it isn’t written down anywhere.

I sift every one of these cakes through Carol’s flour sifter. I am fairly sure it was Nana’s before that. It’s an old tin Androck, the three-screen kind with the hand crank, printed with the little atomic starbursts that put it somewhere around the fifties, and the label has worn down to almost nothing from being handled.

It has never been washed. It does not get washed. You don’t put water through a flour sifter; damp screens mean rust and clumping and a ruined tool. So it gets shaken out, zipped into a plastic bag, and put back in the pantry. That is how it was handed to me and that is how it goes back, and it is the only storage instruction I have ever followed to the letter.

A recipe older than I am, an oven temperature nobody uses, and a sifter nobody is allowed to wash. That’s the inheritance. I changed the nuts.

Here’s the thing I’ll fight about, though: this cake does not need frosting. It’s spicy and moist and full of texture and it stands up perfectly well on its own. I have served it bare with a dollop of whipped cream on the side and had people ask for the recipe.

But cream cheese frosting on carrot cake is traditional, and traditional is traditional for a reason, and this is the exact bump of decadence the cake wants. So I make the frosting. I just want you to know you have options, and that “I didn’t have cream cheese” is not a reason to skip making this.

One more thing, and it’s the only real technique note in the whole recipe: let it cool completely before you frost it. Not mostly. Not “it’s barely warm.” Completely. Cream cheese frosting will melt and separate on a warm cake and then slide off it in a way that cannot be fixed, only mourned. Go do something else for two hours. The cake will keep.

I know this because I know what a badly frosted cake looks like. There is a whole story there, about a carrot cake I made in 2010 that was not this one, and about what happened when I set a recipe I trusted down on the counter and walked away from it to chase something fancier. That story is coming. It is not a happy one, and the photographs are gorgeous, which somehow makes it worse.

For now: here’s the one that works.

Notes

On the pan. A 9×13 and an 8×12 both work. The 8×12 is the smaller dish, so the batter sits deeper and it’ll want roughly 10 more minutes. Start testing early either way; ovens lie.

On the nuts. Use pecans. Use walnuts. Use whatever you have. Just use more than a cup of them.

On room-temperature eggs. If you forgot (I always forget), sit them in a bowl of warm tap water for five minutes and get on with your life.

On the pineapple. Buy a 20-ounce can packed in juice, not syrup. You want one cup of drained fruit out of it, which is about eight ounces by weight; written as “1 cup (8 ounces)” that reads like an 8-ounce can, and a cake short half a cup of pineapple is drier and sadder than it needs to be. Drain through a sieve and press it.

Keep the juice. A 20-ounce can gives up about a cup and a half, which is a real drink and not a swallow. Put it over ice and sip it while the cake cools; you’ve got two hours to fill. Add a splash of whiskey or vodka if you’re in the time and the place for it. I was, on a hot evening, and it hit exactly right, so there’s a pineapple juice cocktail coming to this blog shortly. Consider this the trailer.

On storage. Covered, on the counter, two days. In the refrigerator if it’s frosted and it’s July in Georgia, which it is. Let refrigerated slices come back to room temperature before you eat them; cold flattens the spice.

P.S. If you make this with walnuts, Carol will be pleased and I will respect your choices from a distance.

P.P.S. The golden raisins are not negotiable in my kitchen and entirely negotiable in yours.

P.P.P.S. “Cool it completely” is the single most ignored instruction in all of baking and I have personally ignored it more than once, which is how I know exactly what it costs. Two hours. Go weed something.

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