Reader makes carrot cake, nails it

Ellen Johnson emailed The Spokesman-Review Features section on Monday to brag about her husband’s first-ever scratch-made carrot cake – and rightly so.

The recipe came from Wednesday’s Food section. And Tom Warner, a retired deputy with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, decided to give it a go.

“He baked the cake Saturday night for dinner on Easter and kept it in the (fridge),” Johnson wrote. “We had eight for dinner, and people said it was the best carrot cake they have ever eaten.”

This is especially exciting because, Johnson said, “My husband has made a cake out of a box, but never a cake of this caliber.”

He’s no stranger to the kitchen, though.

“Tom does almost all the cooking but has never baked a lot,” his wife wrote. “His baking days are now just beginning.”

He made a couple of changes to the carrot cake recipe, soaking the raisins in cognac rather than rum – a trick his wife uses for pecan pie.

And, instead of putting parsley on top of the cake, he found “real carrot tops in the produce section at Rosauers! The produce employee probably thought he was a crazy when he was asking for carrot tops!”

It was, Johnson said, “a great recipe. This cake had so many ingredients: applesauce, carrots, crushed pineapple, coconut, alcohol-infused raisins, nuts. It is now our cake of choice for Easter!”

Johnson sent a photo of her husband with his first-ever scratch-made carrot cake. When correspondent Audrey Alfaro, who shared the recipe in her weekly Dorothy Dean recipe column, saw it, she said it was “so awesome.”

She adapted it from allrecipes.com.

“Nailed it!” she wrote. “Love it!!!”