How to make carrot cake - The Victorian Way

Hasn't it turned cold again? Today I'm making a carrot cake, although really it's more of a pudding. It's an excellent way to add colour to an autumnal table. For this recipe you will need carrots, creme patisserie, sugar, eggs, butter and breadcrumbs. I'm going to start with my carrots. Although this cake tastes very good, the colour is also very important. So you must pick the reddest carrots you can find. I'm going to peel them and then boil them in a little salt. Carrots are a most curious vegetable. Some people don't like them because they're too sweet, however they're really useful in the kitchen for adding to stocks and stews, to create flavour and as a vegetable dish, as an entremet, to add much-needed colour to the second course. There are many different colours in carrots. White, purple, orange-red, although I think the orange and red ones have always been the most popular. Mr Burt grows them very well in many different shades, so I can use whichever colour suits my cooking. And now I'm going to boil them. My carrots are cooked and drained. I'm going to cut them in half, take out the core because it tends to be woody, and then chop them and pass them through this sieve to puree them. I would rather call it a carrot pudding, but then I do make a carrot pudding and that has pastry. Now my carrots need to dry on the range. I'll leave it for Mary-Anne to look after. Now I'm going to make the cake. I've got some creme patisserie here, which is like a stiff custard. It has flour in it. Mary-Anne has made it and it looks like she's done a good job. The first time she made it, I had to sieve out the lumps. Now I'm going to separate two eggs and I'm going to add a whole egg to my yolks. I'm going to add the carrot to my custard, some sugar, the eggs, and now I'm going to whisk my whites. I'm now going to add my egg whites to the mix. Carrots are a very useful vegetable to grow in the garden. When I was younger and times were hard, sometimes my mother would replace sugar in the puddings with carrots. I suppose if sugar was short, you could replace it in cakes, like a pound cake. That would then be a carrot cake. Mary-Anne has lined my dish with butter and bread crumbs, as you would a souffle tin. I'm now going to pour in my mixture and then cook it for about 45 minutes. And now my cake is cooked, I'm going to decorate it with some of these thinly cut candied orange peel. And there we are. Carrot cake. A lovely warming dish for an autumnal family dinner.