8” Carrot Cake

This is a lovely celebration cake consisting of 2 layers of carrot cake filled and covered with salted caramel Swiss meringue buttercream (pictured) and piled with multi colored candied carrot curls.
 
This carrot cake has no nuts, coconut or raisins to distract from its lovely texture. We frost and fill it with a salted caramel Swiss meringue buttercream which is made with egg white, sugar and an 83% European butter. It is much silkier and less sweet than the typical American buttercreams you find in many bakeries many of whom don’t even use butter or who use combination of butter and vegetable shortening or all vegetable shortening. This makes breaks my butter and cream loving heart.  
Please remember, when thinking about the price of this cake, that European style butter with a high butterfat is much more expensive than shortening but you can taste and feel the difference. Making a Swiss meringue buttercream is more complicated than throwing powdered sugar and shortening or butter into a bowl and beating it until its smooth (and it’s never as satiny as a Swiss Meringue buttercream).  Candying the carrots is time consuming and takes finesse.  Each carrot os peeled  very thin. The strips become a tangle of peels which must be picked apart, straightened and laid out on a sheet pan. They are put in the oven to dry but have to be pulled when they are still flexible so they can be curled.  There are not many people in the area who are doing this kind of work with high quality ingredients. 
We can also make it with a traditional cream cheese frosting where we use a combination of butter and cream cheese for a light and creamy frosting.  The we pile the cake high with candied carrot curls.