What's better than banana bread? Fresh mango bread. I used the champagne of mangoes: Ataulfo mangoes. As well, I ground up ginger and cinnamon from Montreal's Philippe de Vienne’s line of épices de cru (small-production "estate" spices). The difference between using freshly dried ginger and cinnamon and the one that's expired on your shelf is incredible. To top it off, I used farm fresh eggs from a local farmer.

Recipe: Fresh Mango Brea

Makes: 12 servings (I halved the recipe.)

Ingredients:

These Pumpkin Muffins have lots of ingredients to please all sorts of taste buds: the crunch of the pecans and sunflower seeds, the soft chew of the raisins, and the spice from the cinnamon/ginger/nutmeg/allspice blend. Although the ingredient list is long, it only requires two bowls: one for the dry ingredients and the other for all the rest, and it goes together fast. These muffins are inspired by the famous pumpkin muffins at Sarabeth's Kitchen in New York. Have you ever taken something you shouldn't? A cookie from the grocery store that are set out to keep the kids quiet long enough to do your grocery shopping in record speed? An extra sample from the Costco ladies saying it's for your child knowing full well they won't like it? A magazine from your Doctor's office? Confession time: For this Pumpkin Muffin recipe, I used the mini ketchup containers from McDonald's! I didn't take very many, but enough to make some one-bite muffins. You could play around and use cookie cutters to bake them in as I did for my Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins. Also, I had extra pumpkin pie filling from my Pumpkin Chai Tart so I used that instead of the unsweetened pumpkin purée suggested in the recipe. Doing this added a touch of chai and coconut to the mix, which was nice. 

When I saw white carrots in the store, I knew it would be fun to try in this week’s carrot cake recipe. There are other colored carrots you can buy, such as purple, yellow, or red, but white were the only unusual ones I found before the Tuesday deadline. I found these gems after I'd made the cake and found the darker they are, the sweeter they are.

Since white carrots aren’t as sweet as the orange ones, I thought this would be an interesting balance to the sweetness of the cake and icing.

Garnishes
I crave a “crunchiness” in every dish, so I added a couple of garnishes that would feed this craving.

For one, I made some candied walnuts. I mixed some walnuts with 2 tablespoons of corn syrup, ½ tablespoon maple syrup, and 1 tablespoon sugar. I spread this nut mixture on a Silpat and popped it in a 325ºF oven for 15 minutes. They added a nice crunch on top of the cake or sprinkled around the plate.

I also took an idea from Michel Richard in Happy in the Kitchen, and deep fried julienned carrots. Before deep frying them, I dredged them with cornstarch so that the water in the carrots didn't cause the oil to boil over. After frying, I sprinkled them with icing sugar and used immediately (or as soon as I could get everything plated and ready for the camera!). They don’t retain their crunchiness for long.

Another idea from Michel Richard was to make homemade vanilla ice cream with chunks of carrot cake in it. I took the simple route and used my mixer to stir in carrot cake chunks into store-bought vanilla ice cream. This was a great way to make plain ol’ vanilla ice cream delicious.


Finally, I made a carrot syrup from Michel Richard’s cookbook. Into some sugar syrup that’s turned a caramel color (like the caramel for crème caramel), I added freshly squeezed carrot and orange juice and boiled it down. It had a beautiful, rich color and took Dorie’s simple, but tasty dessert up a notch.

Cool baking pan and other fun stuff
I found this cool baking pan in my research about this recipe.


I also found a cute cartoon about carrot cake at this link.

Recipe: Carrot Cake

You can find the recipe for Bill's Big Carrot Cake in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours (affiliate link) by Dorie Greenspan. To see how the rest of the TWD group fared with this week's recipe, click here and then click on each blogger!


Tasting Notes
This is a great carrot cake recipe. The addition of coconut and raisins makes it extra special. Soaking the raisins in rum beforehand might be a nice variation for next time.

The white carrots were more popular in the cake than the orange ones. The cake made with the orange carrots was a touch sweeter. Although, I liked the color of the orange carrots in the cake, side-by-side, the white ones win in the tasting category.

This is another keeper recipe from Dorie!

Recipe for Next Week (April 29)
Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake on pages 200-201 chosen by Caitlin of Engineer Baker.