An appealing Easter carrot cake recipe

In just 10 days it will be Easter, the most important holiday on the Christian calendar, a celebration whose central message of hope is perhaps more sorely needed now than ever before.

This year's Easter dinner is likely to be memorable, though not for the right reasons. We might not be able to serve the foods we're used to serving or even risk sitting around the dinner table in close proximity.

Given the stakes, we can handle the disruptions, but if there's one part of this year's holiday dinner that I hope I won't have to give up, it's carrot cake, what the Epicurious website calls the classic Easter dessert.

What carrots have to do with the death and resurrection of Christ I'm not exactly sure, but it wouldn't be the first Easter food that is perplexing. Ham, for example, is the traditional centerpiece of the Easter meal, even though Jesus most likely did not include it in his diet. Though he was occasionally insubordinate, he was, after all, a practicing Jew.

Carrots are presumably appropriate for Easter because in addition to being harbingers of Spring, they are what rabbits like, and the Easter bunny is the major commercial symbol of the religious holiday.

A food processor and a bag of baby carrots make preparing the classic Easter dessert, carrot cake, a snap.Submitted by Tom Harte

Turns out the rabbit's association with Easter has pagan roots going all the way back to at least the 13th century to the Teutonic goddess of spring, Eostra, from whom the word Easter may have been derived.

Whatever the case, carrots have always been on our Easter menu in one form or another, and the best form, of course, is cake. (People are right when they say cake is the answer -- regardless of the question.) Using carrots, among the sweetest of vegetables, in desserts, like carrot pudding for example, has a long tradition, dating back to Medieval times, but the history of carrot cake in particular is a bit more obscure. At least one source, cake historian Stella Parks, suggests that the dessert was really the result of simply misreading a recipe for currant cake.

Most historians, however, believe carrot cake evolved from the carrot puddings popular in the Middle Ages. Then in the 1900s enterprising bakers began preparing the puddings in loaf pans, a form much closer to the look of a cake.

Viola Schlicting from Texas is sometimes given credit for the first true carrot cake recipe in the 1960s, a reworking of her German carrot-nut bread recipe. The Philadelphia Cream Cheese people got into the act by promoting cream cheese icing as the perfect complement to carrot cake, thus underscoring the notion that all cakes are essentially merely vehicles for the delivery of frosting.

The most exciting development in the history of carrot cake, if you ask me, is the invention of baby carrots. The brainchild of Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, they are, as everybody by now knows, not really immature carrots but carved from adult carrots to look like babies. They have transformed the previously struggling carrot industry, which they now dominate, but more to the point, armed with a food processor they make concocting carrot cake a snap. You don't even have to peel them.

Easiest Carrot Cake Ever

This trendy "naked" cake with just one layer and all the frosting on top couldn't be easier to make or better suited to restrained times. The recipe is adapted from one by Donna Hay.

• 1 bag (16 ounces) baby cut carrots
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1-3/4 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup walnuts
• 6 tablespoons softened butter
• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Finely chop carrots in a food processor. Add sugars, flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, oil, yogurt, eggs, and vanilla and process until combined. Add walnuts and pulse until coarsely chopped. Pour batter into springform pan which has been buttered and the bottom lined with parchment paper and bake at 325 degrees for 55 to 60 minutes until cake tests done. Cool completely. Meanwhile, combine butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, and lemon juice in a food processor and process until smooth. Pile frosting on top of cake.