Italian carrot cake
Torta di carote
I like carrot cakes, but no matter what ethnic cookbooks I’ve consulted the recipes are always the same. And of course, one pound flour, one pound butter, one pound sugar and one pound carrots with a touch of cinnamon never fails. Still, I’d like to expand the repertoire a little once in a while, and Marcella Hazan’s Italian carrot cake is something else.
The recipe, first published in Marcella’s Italian Kitchen
, contains no butter and no flour. Instead, she prescribes an awful lot of almonds mixed with crushed “Tiramisu” biscuits. Strange. And the strangest thing still is that it works. Apparently, savoiardi contain a lot of starch, and they have a peculiar lemony-vanilla taste that I cannot quite place and that is not listed on the package, but it goes really well with the carrots, the almonds and the Amaretto. A worthy reward for the hard work with the food processor.
Ingredients
4 eggs
250 g almonds
250 g sugar
5 carrots
200 g savoiardi (lady finger biscuits)
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp amaretto (optional)
Preparation
Separate egg whites from egg yolks.
Beat the whites stiff and – afterwards in another bowl– mix yolks with sugar.
Put the almonds in a food processor and grind them finely
Mix almonds with egg yolks and sugar.
Put the savoiardi in the food processor and crunch them to crumbs. This proved harder than I expected (maybe because my food processor is ridiculously small). Next time I’ll bake them in the oven for 20 minutes until crisp, place them in a strong plastic bag and beat it to crunch the biscuits.
Mix crunched bisquits – they don’t have to be all homogeneous – with yolks, sugar and almonds.
Add baking powder, amaretto and peeled, grated carrots and mix well. (The carrots can also be chopped in the food processor, if you’ve got a proper power tool).
Fold the cake mixture in the beaten egg whites.
Place in a greased, round cake tin and bake at 170 C / 350 F for 45 minutes until the Italian carrot cake feels firm.
Other cakes worth trying
Marcella Hazan’s Italian carrot cake is quite different the ordinary tray bake.
Mmmm that looks yummy! (^_^)
This looks more like a pecan pie. I like the typical carrot cake, but I believe I would like this much more!
How can something with made from almonds and crushed tiramisu biscuits not be absolutely delicious?!? Being lifelong carrot cake lovers we find this recipe fascinating and look forward to enjoying it!