Brown Butter Carrot Cake with Vanilla Lime Curd and Cream Cheese Frosting

Hey my dudes!

This past weekend I threw myself a 30th birthday party and it was the greatest time! The theme was Springtime/Floral Cocktail party. We had rhubarb and gin cocktails made by my friend Mathilda. I served a bunch of hors d’oeuvres which I will be posting about later this week. But the star of the show was, of course, the cake! I made a brown butter carrot cake with a vanilla lime curd and cream cheese frosting. I always have carrot cake on my birthday, as it’s my all time favorite. There is something about the subtle spices, the moisture from the carrots, then tang from the cream cheese frosting, it’s just the best!

Brown Butter Carrot Cake 

To make the cake, put all the butter in a small pot. Place on the stove over fairly high heat. I am impatient and like to cook my brown butter on high while whisking continuously just because I think it goes faster. Just as the butter particles start to brown, turn off the stove and continue whisking. The residual heat in the pan will brown the butter to a nice deep, dark golden brown without burning it. Put that to the side to cool down while you work on the rest of the batter.

Peel, and then top and tail, the carrots. Grate on a box grater. I used both the big holes and the small holes. I did about 50/50 bigger hole and smaller hole just because I like to have both textures in the cake. You could do both only chunky or only small if you wished.

Peel and grate the ginger on a micro plane . You could, of course, use dried powdered ginger, but I like the zing that fresh ginger gives. Set that also to the side and prepare the dry ingredients. 

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cloves, and  cinnamon. Set that to the side as well.

Into yet another bowl crack the eggs and pour in the buttermilk. Whisk those together and then whisk in the sugar and a touch of vanilla extract. I like to measure with my heart but be in the ballpark of a teaspoon or two.

Slowly pour the cooled brown butter in. The butter still needs to be liquid but no longer hot hot, warm is good. Make sure you really scrape out all of the brown butter solids that settle on the bottom of the pan. This is where all the flavor is. Whisk that together really really well and then add in all of the dries in one go. Just dump it in there and stir. I think it’s easier to stir the wet and dries together without the carrots so you can really see that there’s no lumps in the batter.  Throw in the carrots and ginger, and begin folding. The batter might really really thick if the carrots are still a little bit cold from the fridge. 

Side note: You could replace the brown butter straight one to one with oil if you wanted to. You’d get a looser cake batter but you’d sacrifice a layer of flavor. Do as you see fit. 

Oil two 9 inch cake pans and layer the bottom with parchment. I used a 9 inch nonstick springform, just because I think they are so easy to use. Even though it was nonstick I still oiled it just in case. 

Bake for 30 minutes at 350F/175C. Make sure a toothpick insert in the middle comes out clean. If it doesn’t pop back in the oven for another 5 minutes. 

I made these cakes several days before my party as I was trying to get ahead on prep. I wrapped them really well in plastic wrap and then froze them. When freezing make sure they are sitting completely flat and nothing is squishing them from the top. 

Vanilla Lime Curd

A day before the party I made the lime curd. I wanted to make sure that it had time to set properly.

Zest 3 limes and then juice them. You need 90g lime juice and three juice limes should get you 90g plus a bit extra. Scrape the seeds out of the vanilla bean. Into a small pot add the eggs, sugar, lime juice, all of the zest and all of the vanilla bean. Mix together really really well and immediately put on the stove. You don’t want the eggs, sugar, and citrus to hang out together for too long without cooking or they will kind of cook themselves and your curd has the potential to be weird. On medium high whisking continuously bring the curd up to 180F/82°C.

As soon as it comes to temp  take it off the stove and pour it through a fine mesh strainer. This is a really important step so that you have a nice, smooth curd. Give your curd a good whisk to release some of the heat and then start adding the butter tablespoon by tablespoon. Once all the butter is incorporated press a layer of plastic wrap on contact and pop the whole thing into the fridge to set, preferably overnight.

Cream Cheese Frosting 

On party day, I got started with the cream cheese frosting. Now I’m not going to lie to you guys or hide my mistakes from you. This frosting was a journey and I don’t suggest doing what I did. I had to use a lot of my pastry chef knowledge and a lot of experimentation to get this frosting to come together and the whole process took me over two hours, which was very stressful.

I was following a recipe from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook (pg. 167) which is as follows:

Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

¾ c butter, room temp

24 oz cream cheese, room temp

2 c powdered sugar

¾ tsp finely grated orange zest

1 Tbsp + 1 tsp grated fresh ginger

Pinch of salt

Martha says to beat butter on medium-high until light and fluffy, 2 minutes. Then add the cream cheese, beat again until light and fluffy, an additional 2 minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, beat 5 minutes, then boom done. 

This is what I did:

500g Room temp butter went into the mixing bowl first and was whipped up using the paddle attachment until light and fluffy, about two or three minutes. I scraped down the sides and then added in 600 g of room temp Philadelphia. Whipped that another two or three minutes with the paddle attachment and then there was so much in this bowl I started adding the powdered sugar spoonful by spoonful. I added 900g of powdered sugar. Then I added a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract and some salt and realized that my frosting was not coming together and started to freak out a little bit. 

I switched to the whisk attachment and tried to whisk it together for like 15-20 minutes and it just broke even more. I popped the whole thing into the fridge for about half an hour and then tried mixing it up with my paddle attachment again. It didn’t really help so I thought maybe there’s too much fat or it’s too cold.

I added some boiling water a tablespoon at a time.  At first I thought it was working but nope! That didn’t help. Switched back to the whisk attachment, but still wasn’t helping so I decided to throw half of the frosting in another bowl and into the fridge while I worked on just 1/2 of the frosting at a time. I tried a little bit more boiling water but that still wasn’t helping so then I thought maybe there actually isn’t enough fat and it’s actually too warm so I started adding cold butter bit by bit. This actually did help and my frosting did eventually come together. There was not enough fat in it!

If you guys have a rock solid cream cheese frosting recipe, please let me know down below in the comments so I can use it for my birthday cake next year. 

Building the Cake

I took my cake layers directly from the freezer just because I knew the cake was going to be sitting out all day, and I felt like it would be easier to decorate a frozen cake. I piped a nice thick line of frosting around the edge of the first layer and then added my curd to the middle. Second layer got stacked on top and then I crumb coated the whole thing in a light layer of frosting and popped it back into the fridge for about an hour. 

Once chilled I added a nice thick layer of frosting all around the cake and did my best to smooth it out. I make American style cake only about once or twice a year and while I am a pastry chef and a baker, cake decorating is not something I have ever done for work or anything I have ever trained with, so this was definitely me just winging it based on techniques that I have seen on YouTube and Instagram. I tried my best with a cute little border on the bottom and a swirly kind of thing on the top. This was a lot harder for me than I thought it was going to be. 

Since the party theme was springtime and florals I dyed some frosting yellow and pink for flowers and green for the leaves. I have these fun flower piping tips that I got at Joanne’s when I was in the United States and they are so great because you don’t really need much technique you just go *blows raspberry* with the piping bag and boom you have a flower. The flower tips are from the Wilton Flower Bloom Set.

https://www.joann.com/wilton-easy-blooms-tip-set/15501786.html

While the flowers were easy, the leaves were not! I could not for the life of me make these leaves look cute. I thought maybe my frosting was too stiff so I tried to knock out some air by blending it with my hand blender. That did not work. Tried to heat up the frosting a little bit so it was looser but I ended up melting it so I had to mix it with my remaining white frosting to get it to cool down again. It still wasn’t working. I had been using a Wilton 352. Finally I gave up, switched piping tips, and boom! My leaves were adorable! I changed to a tip from a set by Flying Tiger Copenhagen. It looks like it’s a cross between a Wilton 113 and a Wilton 69.

Once I was happy with the amount of flowers and leaves I took some gold powder and just kind of sprinkled it all over the top because everything is better with some glitter. The cake was done and went into the fridge until party time. I took it out a couple hours before eating so it wouldn’t be cold. 

All in all, despite the struggles, it was a great cake. The curd and cake recipes were so delicious, you guys will looove them. The cream cheese frosting, while it turned out alright in the end was too much of a struggle. Can’t wait to try a different recipe for my 31st.

Hej då!