Carrot Cake in London: What Separates a Good One

Carrot cake is ordered more often in this country than almost anything else, and it disappoints more often than almost anything else. Both facts have the same cause: it is easy to make something that looks exactly right and eats like a damp spice loaf under a lid of sweet cheese.

The faults are consistent. Once you know them you can spot a bad one before you have finished the first mouthful, and you can tell a bakery is serious about it from the first slice.

Fault one: the carrot is not doing anything

A carrot cake should taste of carrot. Not strongly, not as a vegetable, but present, sweet and slightly earthy behind the spice.

What usually happens instead is that the carrot is grated too coarsely and goes in as strands that steam into nothing and leave orange threads through the crumb, contributing water and no flavour. Or there is simply not enough of it, because carrot is bulky and messy and reducing it is the easiest corner to cut.

Ours is a heavy cake for its size, around 1.7 kg at 18 cm, and a large part of that weight is carrot. Grated fine, so it disappears into the crumb rather than sitting in it, and enough of it that the sponge is dense and moist without any help from extra oil.

Fault two: the spicing is one note

Most carrot cake is cinnamon and nothing else. Cinnamon is the loudest of the warm spices and the one that flattens everything around it, and a cake spiced only with cinnamon tastes of Christmas potpourri.

What a good one has is cinnamon with other things behind it: nutmeg for the muskiness, ginger for the heat at the back of the throat, a small amount of clove or allspice for depth, and salt, which most home recipes are frightened of. The salt is not there to be tasted. It is there so the sweetness of the frosting has something to arrive against.

Fault three: the frosting is a lid

Cream cheese frosting is where most carrot cakes are lost. The temptation is to make it stable, which means more icing sugar and more butter, and what you end up with is buttercream that has been told about cheese.

Proper cream cheese frosting is sharp. It should taste of the cheese first and of sugar second, it should be soft enough to spread rather than pipe into sculpture, and it should not survive four hours on a warm table, because a frosting that firm has too much fat and sugar in it to taste of anything.

The sharpness is doing exactly the job the sour cream does in a medovik and the apricot does in a Prague cake. Sweet sponge, sweet frosting, no contrast, no interest after two forkfuls.

Signature Carrot CakeSignature carrot cake, 18 cm and about 1.7 kg. Spiced sponge with walnuts and cream cheese frosting.£74Order this

Fault four: it has been kept cold

This one is the customer's rather than the baker's, and it ruins more slices than anything on the list.

Carrot cake is an oil based sponge, and oil firms up in the fridge. Cut a slice straight from the cold and the crumb is tight, the spices are muted, the frosting is stiff, and the cake tastes of considerably less than it is.

Forty minutes out of the fridge before serving. An hour if the kitchen is cold. It makes more difference than anything else you could do to it.

The walnuts

Ours has walnuts through it, which is traditional and which we would not take out. They give the cake something to push back with, and a carrot cake with no texture other than soft crumb is a long slice to eat.

If nuts are a problem at your table, this is not the cake to negotiate over, and the honest alternatives are elsewhere in the range. The Napoleon and the honey cake are both nut free, as is the Bird’s Milk, which is the lightest of the three.

Strawberries & Cream CakeStrawberries and cream cake, 18 cm. Light sponge, fresh strawberries and whipped cream.£68Order this

What ours is

Eighteen centimetres, about 1.7 kg, spiced sponge with finely grated carrot and walnuts, cream cheese frosting kept deliberately sharp. It cuts into ten to twelve substantial slices and it is one of the heavier cakes we make.

It is a good cake for a mixed table, for an afternoon rather than after a large dinner, and for anybody who has decided they do not like Eastern European cakes and needs something familiar to start from. Several of our regular medovik customers came in through the carrot cake.

What a supermarket carrot cake is actually made of

Worth reading a label sometime, because the ingredient order explains everything about how one tastes.

On most of them, sugar is first or second, oil is high up, and carrot appears some way down, frequently after the flour and sometimes after the sultanas. A cake where carrot is the fourth or fifth ingredient by weight will taste of spiced sponge, because that is what it is.

The frosting is usually listed as a cream cheese frosting and is mostly icing sugar and vegetable fat, with cream cheese present in a percentage the packaging does not always volunteer. That is why it holds its shape on a warm shelf for a week.

And there is almost always a humectant, glycerol or sorbitol, to keep the crumb from drying over a long shelf life. It works. It also gives that slightly slick, damp mouthfeel that industrial cake has and home baking does not.

None of this is a scandal, and a cheap carrot cake is a reasonable thing to buy. But it explains why people who have only eaten that version are surprised by one with a kilogram of actual carrot in it.

Common questions

Does your carrot cake contain nuts?

Yes, walnuts, through the sponge. They cannot be left out of this recipe. It also contains gluten, eggs and milk.

How far ahead do I need to order?

Forty eight hours, like everything except bread, which needs 72. The cake is baked for the delivery date you choose rather than taken from a shelf.

How many people does it serve?

Ten to twelve. It is a dense cake and the slices are filling, so twelve is realistic rather than optimistic.

Can you write a message on it?

Yes. A piped message is added at the checkout as an extra, along with candles if you want them. On a cream cheese frosting the writing is piped rather than printed.

How long does it keep?

Three days in the fridge. It is one of the better keepers among the frosted cakes because the sponge is oil based and stays moist, but the frosting is soft and does not like being out for long stretches.

Is there a larger size?

Not at present on the site. For a large party, the tray sizes we make are the honey cake, the Napoleon and the Bird’s Milk, and those are arranged by talking to us rather than through the checkout.

Ordering one in London

Baked to order in Belgravia and delivered across London and Surrey. £12 delivery to central London postcodes, £15 elsewhere, £50 minimum order, 48 hours notice.