Sweet root B
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Its origins are murky, though most sources agree that it originated in Switzerland in the early 1800s, and it’s still popular there today. Many Swiss birthday cakes are still based on the familiar recipe. And here in Britain, it has been popular since the Second World War, when vegetables were used in the baking of cakes due to rationing of sugar, butter and other more luxurious ingredients.
Using shredded or grated vegetables such as beetroot, courgette, marrows and parsnips helps add bulk and flavour and holds the allimportant moistness that cakes require to be palatable.
Even now, in the trendier food magazines and websites, we see ‘retro’ recipes crop up with regularity – beetroot and chocolate or courgette and lime, and they are wonderful, different cakes, worthy of further research and experimentation.
However, the carrot cake is easily the winner in this race. Undergoing something of a renaissance in the 1970s, as the vegetarian boom swept the nation, the carrot cake appears to have found a permanent place in our hearts, vege or not. There’s a wonderful harmony in the recipe – the moist, chewy carrot shreds buried within that dense, sticky cake, loaded with warming bakery spices and sweet brown sugar.
Then there’s the traditional cream cheese topping, never cloyingly sweet, adding a slightly saline note to keep all the sugar and spice in check. There aren’t many cakes as good with a cup of dark, strong coffee as our friend the carrot.
So to this week’s recipe, which, as I mentioned, is a cookie with all the appeal of the classic carrot cake.
Big, squishy cookies, moist with fruit and nicely spicy, topped with smooth cream-cheese icing. Here I must give credit for the original recipe, upon which I riffed, to Kate Doran, aka The Little Loaf.
Her website is worth visiting – she loves to bake, and her enthusiasm is contagious. I tinkered with the ingredients and quantities a little, but the basic idea was Kate’s. assistance of the younger members of the family.
Fun can be had mixing messily, dolloping with gusto and getting icing all over the place. At the end of it, though, you’ll have the most amazing chewy cookies that echo back through time to those first Alpine origins.