Brazilian Carrot Cake with Brigadeiro
It's not meant to be two layers! 😖 It's meant to be one!
Since @NekoRaita mentioned brigadeiros in the comments a while ago (thank you!), I did some searching up on recipes involving them and stumbled across the Brazilian Carrot Cake. It's actually one of the easiest cakes you can make and it comes out in a very, very beautiful orange colour. I used this recipe from Ash Baber, though I will warn you that the website opens around 4-5 ads on mobile and constantly reloads them to show you more.
The easy part of this cake is that you just blend all the wet ingredients together (chopped carrots, sugar, oil, eggs, vanilla extract), then pour them into the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt). Whisk until no flour remains, so really get at the bottom of the bowl.
I had a slight change in the recipe: I used about 50 ml less of vegetable oil since I ran out and didn't want to substitute with my stronger-tasting salad-only olive oil. I also cut about a fifth of the sugar.
This is where I deviated. I keep forgetting I have non-standard cake tins so I'm always forced to split up the batter into two. The recipe says bake a single one for an hour at 180C, but I baked two tins for 35 mins (swapping and rotating them at 15 mins) instead and toothpick tested them to make sure they were cooked through.
The brigadeiro is probably the hardest part. I think I watched 6 different youtube videos to try and see what consistency I needed to cook it to for the cake. One of the videos obviously cooked for far too long; while the general rule is that you should be able to see the bottom of the pan when you drag the spatula through it, I still kept going for a little bit longer to thicken it. I'm very happy with my final consistency.
When cooking, I had a thought: 😏 "what if I added rum?" And since there are no rules in life, I did.
...I didn't add enough. You can't taste it, so I just wasted rum lol.
So since I had two cakes instead of one larger cake, I decided to frost the middle as well with brigadeiro. It's good to be more conservative with your spread in the middle layer, though I've seen some versions where they just slop on the brigadeiro so it's like a pile of mud on top of the cake.
Overall, very happy with this cake. It's quite easy, it's mostly just ensuring you're constantly stirring the brigadeiro over medium to medium-low heat so it doesn't burn. The consistency matters because if you overheat your brigadeiro it can change the texture to be chewy (or so people say online). Even though I made two layers, I still had a lot of brigadeiro left over, so I'd say just freeze or heat it up more so you can roll it into fudge balls (and then freeze it for up to 3 months). I would roll mine in dessicated coconut but my partner and my friends all hate it so... 😞
Taste-wise, it's like a really, really good chocolate cake with some different aromas mixed in. Which, obviously, is the carrot, but it doesn't taste like carrot. My cake is a little bit drier than I would like, but it's not because I used 50ml less oil--instead, I attribute the dryness to the fact that I had to bake two tins instead of one big cake, so now I have double the amount of crust. One way of fixing this would've been to just tinfoil the cakes halfway through baking it so it doesn't brown too far. The brigadeiro helps, but still, could be a tad bit more moist if I wanted it perfect.
When I first brought it out, everyone asked if it was a giant choco-pie.
I shared this with 7 others and got a slice of basque cheesecake and miso sesame cookies in return. Positive comments regarding the textural contrast from having two layers. The brigadeiro layer in the middle, they said, helped the cake a lot because otherwise it would just be cake and nothing else. It 'kept the cake interesting' while you ate it.
Anyway, I've watched enough baking videos to know that a Brazilian woman whispering "brigadeiro" into my ears is my personal omelette du fromage.