Carrot Cake with Coconut

Carrot cake with coconut is a great way to incorporate vegetables into desserts. Baking it with little helpers allows time to reflect on the skills these small creatures need to be great adults. We are raising adults, not children.

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By this, I mean, I expect my children to be behave as adults once they are adults. In order to do this, they need to learn responsibility now. It is their time to learn how to treat other people with respect, how to take care of themselves, how to follow the rules, and when they should question them. It is the time for them to fail. As children, when they are loved and supported, they get to make mistakes that adults should not ever make.

This is a hard job for parents.

As a parent, I run into plenty of adults that are basically decent human beings. They have meaningful and sustainable jobs. They are active in their communities and their churches. Plenty of them are people that anyone would like to hang out with. And then you start to see those small cracks. Those things that don’t seem like that big of a deal, until they are.

My husband and I had a conversation in the car the other day.

“Do you still like me?” I asked him, knowing it was a stupid question.

“Yes, of course. You are one of my favorite people.” He replied.

“That’s not what I meant.” I said. I realized how much like a stereotypical girl I sounded in that moment. “What I meant is, I am feeling vulnerable right now because I’m working through all of the incidents of the last week. I just finished the book “the Circle” and we saw that episode of “Brooklyn 99″ and all of that is just playing around in my head. It leaves me feeling very outside of myself. I would like to feel more connected to you so that I can feel grounded.”

He looked at me and took my hand. The warmth and strength of his hand grounded me. He knows exactly how hard he needs to hold it to keep me steady. He let me talk.

Last week at work, I attended a meeting to discuss an improvement that needed to be made. During the course the the meeting, I was yelled at by 2 out of the three men that were in the room. The third stayed silent.

Apparently people don’t much like being questioned about why they did something they did. Even when it is literally my job to ask those questions.

They yelled at me.

I wasn’t aggressive, I was calm. My questions were valid. They didn’t see it that way.

Not to make light of the situation, but the details of it are not relevant and may be embarrassing to the people involved. The crux of it was that I was put in a very uncomfortable situation and had to try to maintain any sort of composure. Because I was taught to. I calmly said “If you are going to continue to talk to me that way, I will leave the meeting.” It didn’t stop. I did a quick mental evaluation. My feelings about my treatment seemed less important than the work. Also, I didn’t want to cause more drama or be seen as “emotional”. I held back my tears as well as I could and continued to walk the men backwards through my logic. I wasn’t wrong.

As I was discussing the incident with my friends, they pointed out all the things I could’ve done differently. “Maybe you should just stay quiet.” “It might be a good idea to lie low for a while.” “Let us know if we need to come into meetings with you.”

After I reported the incident to HR, some colleagues told me to not expect much. “They see these guys as too important to the business. They are used to being able to do what they want.”

In follow up meetings, they referred to it as “perceived” yelling.

All of this was in my head when I asked my husband the first stupid question. I followed it up with more. “Do you feel like your opinions are valued at work? What happens at your work when you disagree? “

He assured me that his experience was completely different.

I looked over at him again. “Here’s the thing. It’s not even about me. It’s about our daughter. We’re trying to raise her to be fierce and independent. We encourage her to ask questions and to explore her intelligence. We’re trying to teach our boys about respect for all people. They need to be sensitive about how they treat women.”

A friend of mine was at trivia with her colleagues. As she leaned against a table, a drunk guy came up to her and grabbed her ass. She whipped around and yelled at the guy. He basically laughed it off and said “It’s your last chance to get with this.” Her colleagues sat there and did nothing. They had all had extensive training about prevention of sexual harassment. But harassment, someone would argue, needs to be a continued pattern of behavior. One incident doesn’t mean harassment.

It doesn’t make it better.

As a parent, I take my role seriously. I want my sons to not be the men that yell at women and tear them apart. I don’t want them grabbing unknown women’s asses. My daughter should not go into a room and be set upon by men who should know better.

So we talk. I bring them into the kitchen with me. We bake, we cook, we talk. They tell me about their days and ask about mine. We talk about the good things. They tell me about the bad things. We discuss the “truth”. We discuss how people should be treated. When I have a bad day, which isn’t often any more, they know to listen and try to understand. They know how to give love and comfort to me and each other.

And through all of this, through the conversations, they are learning how to cook. The kitchen is becoming a home to them.

“Hey, can you put this butter in the mixer, please. It needs to be on about 5. So tell me what happened?”

“Honey, if you’d put the carrot peeler away properly, you’d know where to find it now.”

“What do you think the next step should be?”

I’m not always patient, I’m not always kind. I apologize when I’m wrong. I also serve them the carrot cake with coconut they made and decorated while I taught them a little more about being a grown up.

My daughter’s favorite parts of the carrot cake with coconut are licking the beaters and putting on the sprinkles. My favorite part is listening to how they interact with each other.

Sometimes a carrot cake is just a carrot cake. Sometimes it’s a lesson in raising adults.

The Recipe:

Carrot Cake With Coconut

A moist carrot cake with warm spices.  The coconut adds a bit of tropical flavor making this a perfect cake for any time of year
5 from 1 vote
Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 35 minutes
Total Time 55 minutes
Course Dessert
Cuisine American

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Sugar
  • 1/2 cups Cooking Oil
  • 4 Eggs
  • 2 cups Cake Flour sifted
  • 2 tsp Baking Soda
  • 1 tsp Salt
  • 2 tsp Cinnamon
  • 3 cups Carrots ground
  • 1/2 cup Shredded Coconut
  • 3/4 cup Pecans

Frosting

  • 4 oz Cream Cheese
  • 1/2 box Confectioners’ Sugar
  • 1/2 stick Butter

Instructions
 

  • Mix together sugar, oil, and eggs.  Mix dry ingredients together.  Add dry mixture to creamed mixture.  Stir until well combined.  Add carrots, coconut, and nuts.  Mix well.  Pour mixture into a 9x13x2 pan.  Bake at 325 for 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Frosting

  • Blend cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar until spreading consistency.  Spread onto cooled cake.

Notes

As you can tell from the sprinkles, I made this cake for Easter.  It was a hit!
Keyword Carrot Cake

Snow Ice Cream

After one of our big snows this year,I decided to make snow ice cream while the snow was still fresh.

Ice cream

When I was in preschool, I remember doing an experiment where we let snow melt and then evaporate and took turns looking at what was left behind. It was sort of gross, but it never deterred me from catching snowflakes on my tongue.

On a perfect snowy day when the house was full of people, it was time. I asked my eager young friend to go out and gather me a bucket full of clean snow. The snow that day was a little wet and heavy, but was the sort of snow that you just want to put your face into. (There may have been two buckets of snow that came into the house, one of which may have been used for some people’s face prints.)

When a recipe is mere suggestion of ingredients that should be mixed together until the desired stage is reached, you start off slowly. Judging from the amount of snow, I started with a cup of sugar. I took out the wooden spoon my husband got me for Christmas and began to stir. With the snow as wet and heavy as it was, it took more effort than I expected.

I added milk and vanilla.

I stirred.

And then I tasted. It tasted like sweet snow and nothing like ice cream.

Vanilla Ice Cream

I added more milk, more vanilla, more sugar, and stirred.

It was not creamy yet. But it tasted more like I would expect.

We’ll call this the Agile method of making snow ice cream. I bet that would make my boss happy. An adaptive, iterative approach. I had some of my stakeholders test my prototype. The amount of sugar and the amount of vanilla was good, but the texture wasn’t quite creamy enough.

I added more milk, but it was becoming a bit of a melty mess. I threw it in the freezer to reharden.

When it came out, I scooped it into a fancy crystal dish to admire the rich, creamy color. I brought out spoons and we all dug in to take a bite (except for my friend that doesn’t eat snow because the crystals form around dust particles). It was delicious. I poured a bit of my homemade pear caramel on top and took another bite.

Snow ice cream is more like ice milk than actual ice cream. There is no denying that the base of it is snow and not custard. The kids loved it. I thought having an entire gallon of it was a bit excessive.

All in all, it was a fun experiment, but not necessarily worth repeating.

Snow Ice Cream

Snowed in? Cure those ice cream cravings without having to go to the store.

Ingredients
  

  • 1 Gallon Snow
  • Granulated Sugar to taste
  • Milk to taste
  • vanilla to taste

Instructions
 

  • Start with a gallon of fresh snow. Sprinkle granulated sugar on top of snow and stir. Add a milk, more sugar, and vanilla a little at a time. Continue to stir until it has the texture and flavor of ice cream.

Notes

This is less of a recipe and more of a suggestion.  The wetness of the snow will determine how much the snow compresses with the addition of the other ingredients.  Mine did not compact as much as I thought it would and we ended up with a LOT of ice cream.

If you like this recipe, check out some more:  Any Flavor (Raspberry)Pastel Party PieGroovy Teen Bars, and Delightful Danish Pastry

By Request: Rhubarb Dream Dessert

Rhubarb Dream Dessert

I am sure that I mentioned how excited I was about Spring!  When I walked around the yard and saw my rhubarb hatching (when rhubarb emerges from the earth in the spring, it looks like cartoon dinosaur eggs about to hatch), I was already contemplating which rhubarb recipe to make first.  When the stalks had grown enough to harvest, I picked enough for two desserts.  We had happy kids and happy coworkers.

My mom, my friend, and my husband all requested I share this rhubarb recipe, but before we do, let’s detour a little bit.

When we moved into our old house, I noticed that our neighbor had a HUGE patch of rhubarb in the back.  After he had met me, in the spring, he invited me to partake in the sharing of his patch.

Rhubarb Dream Dessert

“I used to have a lot more, but the guy that lived in your house before you decided where the property line was and put Round Up on all the plants that he thought were on his lot.”  I could tell you other stories about that guy, but that’s not the sort of blog that this is.

There were rules that came with patch sharing:

  1. All stalks had to be taken out by hand and pulled from the ground.  There was no cutting.
  2. Never take too much at a time.
  3. Leaves should be left behind to cut down on weeds.

There was also one unspoken rule.  Everything that was made out of rhubarb from that patch should be shared with said neighbor.  I feed people I like.  I liked him.  It was obvious.  He got a jar of my rhubarb chutney.  He got a jar of my rhubarb bbq sauce.  I gave him slices of desserts to try and jars of jams and jellies.Rhubarb Dream Dessert

If you have enough rhubarb in your yard, I like to make jars of rhubarb syrup to flavor cocktails and mocktails.  Or, be like Baker Man and make some Rhubarb Curd.

But before any of that and if you only have a limited amount of rhubarb, you need to stop what you are doing and make this delicious Rhubarb Dream Dessert.  It’s slightly sour, slightly sweet, rich, but light and a study in contrast.  It’s utterly delicious.  It’s creamy enough to not need the recommended whipped cream, but if you happened to have a scoop of vanilla ice cream that needed a friend, you might introduce them.Rhubarb Dream Dessert

I can see this being a go-to recipe for years to come.  It doesn’t transport as well as the cake I’m going to share with you next week, but it may not need to.  And just as a note, the pan size seems weird.  It’s a about a half sheet pan.  I happened to have one.  If you don’t, I’d probably use an 8×8 square.

Rhubarb Dream Dessert

1 cup flour
5 TB powdered sugar
1/2 cup margarine
Mix together and press into a 7 1/2″x11 1/2″x 1 1/2″ pan.  Bake at 350° for 15 minutes.

Topping:
2 beaten eggs
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp salt
2 cups chopped rhubarb
Spoon on crust and bake 35 minutes at 350°.  Serve warm (or cold) with whipped cream (or ice cream).

For other dessert recipes check out my newly photographed indexed dessert recipe page. If you’ve made something similar or want to tell me about your favorite rhubarb recipe use the comments to tell me. 

Danish Puff

The thing about these old recipes is that often I have no idea what the recipe looks like.  I don’t know if I’ve had the dish before because I don’t know the names of everything I’ve eaten.  It’s the same with me for music.  I know lots of songs, but can’t tell you titles of most of them.

Which gets into the whole misheard lyrics thing.  So quick sidebar, about 2 years ago I heard that the song “Little Red Corvette” was coming on the radio.  I was a kind of excited because I was actually going to hear what that song was.  I had known about the song for ages, but never knew what the song was.  Except when it came on, I totally knew the song.  I had just always thought that when Prince sang “Little Red Corvette”, he was singing “Feeling coming back”. I guess that would be a proper response to the song to “I Can’t Feel My Face.”

Reigning myself back in here, Danish Puff.

The big lesson here is that sometimes cooking is about improvisation.  When teaching the kids to cook, I have oft repeated “read all the way through the recipe before you get started”.  Normally I follow my own advice, but days had passed between my original reading of the recipe and then life happened.  There was also the stinging nettle incident.  When it came time to actually make the recipe, my head was no longer in the game.  And there was the nagging sensation that I should be starting dinner instead of making pastry.  Pie dough for Danish Puff

I made the pie dough, but wasn’t sticking together properly.  Adding more cold water didn’t help.  I know how pie crust works.  You want to add just enough water to hold it together.  Something in my head said that it needed more fat. I added two sticks of butter when I put it together because of the way the recipe was written.  After I had done that I noticed the instructions called for only one stick.  I had skipped the part where it said to only put half the flour in the bowl for the crust.  The other half was used for the filling.  Crap!  And by now the dough was getting to the point where I was sure it was overworked, but how do you add butter after the fact?

I got out the food processor, added everything back in there with a bit more flour and tried again.  This time the dough was smooth and pliable.  It was easy to roll out into oblong shapes.

Pie crust oval for Danish Puff

It’s amazing what happens when you read instructions.

I still needed to double the filling to compensate for the doubled crust.  At this point I was hoping the recipe would come out at all and taste halfway decent because, otherwise, that’s a lot of wasted ingredients.  And considering I was flying blind with this recipe…

Danish puff choux pastryReading the recipe, I got the idea that it was pie crust with choux pastry spread on top.  You have eaten choux pastry as a cream puffs or eclairs.  It’s rich and eggy and if you don’t let the steam out, it deflates and gets sort of creamy inside.  That was exactly what it was.  There was nothing sweet about the pie crust or the choux, just richness, a bit of crisp, the almond flavor.  The sweetness came in from the glaze poured all over the top.

The recipe said to bake the Puff between 350° and 400° for about 50 minutes.  I opted for 375°.  The pastry on the darker pan on the top rack took about 5 minutes less than the pastry on the pan on the bottom rack.  Despite not having directions, I made the powdered sugar glaze.  I wasn’t sure how much to make. I guessed and used about a cup or so of powdered sugar and just enough water to make it smooth. dscn2352.jpg

Frankly, it’s delicious.  We snacked on it before dinner, since I neglected to make dinner until the Danish Puff baked.  We also ate it as a snack after dinner, for breakfast this morning, probably some for a snack later on. It may benefit from some slivered almonds sprinkled on top just for that added crunch.  One might consider whether or not it needed something spread between the layers of pastry.  No one would complain if I made it again.

The Recipe:

Danish puff

Danish Puff

1 cup (2 sticks) margarine
2 cups flour
1/4 t salt
2 T cold water
1 c. boiling water
1 t. almond extract
3 eggs
powdered sugar icing

  1. Cut 1/2 cup margarine in 1 cup flour and salt until resembles coarse meal.  Add cold water and stir until blended.  Divide dough in half and press each half into an oblong on an ungreased baking sheet.
  2. Place boiling water and remaining 1/2 c margarine in saucepan.  Bring to boil. When margarine is melted add flavoring and remove from heat.
  3. Immediately stir in remaining 1 cup flour.  Beat mixture smooth and add eggs one at a time beating well.  Spread over pie pastry.  Bake 350-400 about 50 min.  Frost cakes while hot.  Cut into slices and serve warm.

16 servings

For other delicious desserts try Kringla, Apple Butter Cake, or Corn Flake Bars.

Danish Puff Pin