Italian Carrot Cake

Adapted from Marcella’s Italian Kitchen by Marcella Hazan (Harper & Row, 1986)

Barbara and Aunt Rita discovered this lovely Marcella Hazan recipe in the December 1997 issue of Food & Winemagazine. I later realized it also appears in Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, one of my very favorite cookbooks. I’ve been meaning to post it for a long time and just haven’t gotten around to it. It’s for the kind of cake I just love—plain with a delicious crumb—the sort of cake Molly makes; the type of cake Clotilde bakes. You would like those; I think you’ll like this one.

Serves 8 to 10

9 ounces whole almonds, unblanched (very important—I’ve often followed Marcella’s advice to use unblanched almonds in other recipes, and she’s right)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
9 ounces carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
1/4 pound store-bought Savoiardi (Italian ladyfingers)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs, separated
1 tablespoon butter for greasing the pan (there is no fat in the actual cake)
Lightly whipped cream to top the cake (optional—but good)

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Place the Savoiardi on a baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes, or until crisp. Remove from the oven, let cool slightly, then break into small pieces. Raise the oven temperature to 350°F and grease the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan with butter. (If you are not using a springform pan, line a 10-inch cake pan with buttered parchment paper. I assume you can use a 9-inch pan if that’s what you have, but I haven’t tried it myself.)

Place the almonds and sugar in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade and process until the almonds are ground fine—but not turned into almond butter. Transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Place the carrot pieces in the processor bowl (still using the metal blade) and chop as finely as possible. Add the chopped carrots to the almond/sugar mixture and mix well.

Add the Savoiardi pieces to the food processor and process until very fine. Add to the bowl and combine thoroughly.

Add the baking powder, Amaretto, and salt to the bowl and mix well. Then stir in the egg yolks.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Stir 1 to 2 tablespoons of the beaten whites into the mixture in the bowl to lighten it, then gently fold in the remaining egg whites.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Place the pan on the upper rack of the oven and bake for 50 to 60 minutes. Begin checking at 50 minutes with a cake tester—if it comes out dry, the cake is done.

Let the cake cool slightly before removing it from the pan. Serve at room temperature, with lightly whipped cream if you wish.

This cake will keep, wrapped in foil, for up to a week without refrigeration. But there’s no chance it will last that long unless you leave town before finishing it.

Shrimp Cakes

Adapted from How to Eat by Nigella Lawson (John Wiley & Sons, 2000)

If I were hard pressed—I mean really hard pressed—to have only one cookbook in the world, I would have to seriously consider the 2000 American paperback edition of How to Eat by Nigella Lawson. I love this book for its soft feel, the deliciousness of the food inside the pages, for the sense memories it brings back to me as a child having spent so much time in England, for Nigella Lawson's interest in Italy and Italian food, and for the precision of the descriptions and the lavishness (not opulence) of what Nigella eats.

This is a recipe that is so much fun to make if you have a really good friend over and you're hanging around the kitchen quaffing down light white wine (think slightly frizzante low-alcohol Vinho Verde) or a couple of cold light beers—or (why not?) your favorite Champagne—and you want something yummy to munch on. If you try these little shrimp cakes, you'll come up with accompaniments of your own, which will depend on your eating preferences. But I think a tart green salad made simply from Boston lettuce to pick at with your fingers, while you dip these little puppies in a mayonnaise-y accompaniment as fast as they come hot out of the frying pan and pop into your mouth, would be good.

Nigella Lawson’s Shrimp Cakes

½ pound shrimp, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
2 scallions, white and green parts, minced
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons dry sherry
Neutral vegetable oil (I use grapeseed)
Mayonnaise-y Dip

Put the shrimp, garlic, scallions, salt, flour, sherry, and enough water to make a thick batter in a food processor. Turn the machine on, and process until a thick batter is formed. Put the batter into a bowl, and let stand, covered with plastic film, for one hour.

Put the oil to a depth of 2 inches in a pan, heat, then drop in the shrimp batter by the teaspoonfuls, and fry until golden brown, about a minute on each side. Drain on paper towels.

Mayonnaise-y Dip
Make homemade mayonnaise, omitting the Dijon mustard, substituting lime juice for lemon, and adding a handful of fresh chopped cilantro at the end. If you don't feel like making your own mayo, add lime juice and chopped cilantro to your favorite store-bought brand. It won’t be as good, but it will be good enough—because these morsels of shrimp can carry the day. If too exhausted even for that, just squeeze fresh lime juice on them and carry on.

---