Spicy's Sweet Treats

Carrot Layer Cake

By: The Old-Fashioned Bake Sale Book      

Christmas of 2011, I found my favorite gift ever. I had gotten a 25 piece set from Wilton and my own turn table. I was so excited and once i saw that I had a basket weave tip, I knew that I was going to create a basket cake for Easter.  

 Ingredients:

Cake:

•  1 Package Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Classic Yellow Cake Mix
• 4 Eggs
• 1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil
• 3 Cups Grated Carrots
• 1 Cup Finely Chopped Nuts
• 2 Teaspoons ground cinnamon

Cream Cheese Frosting: 

• 1 Package (8 ounces) Cream Cheese, Softened
• 1/4 Cup Butter Or Margarine, Softened
• 2 Teaspoons Vanilla Extract
• 4 Cups Confectioners' Sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour, or spray a two 8 inch or 9 inch round baking pans.
2.  For cake, combine cake mix, eggs, oil, carrots, nuts and cinnamon in a large bowl. Beat at low speed with electric mixer until moistened. Beat at medium speed for 2 minutes. Pour into prepared pans. Bake at 350F for 35 to 40 minutes r until toothpick inserted in centers comes out clean. Cool.
3. For cream cheese frosting, place cream cheese, butter and vanilla extract in a large bowl. Beat at low speed until smooth and creamy. Add confectioners' sugar gradually, beating until smooth. Add more sugar to thicken, or milk or water to thin frosting, as needed. Fill and frost cooled cake. Garnish with whole pecans or learn how to decorate it like the picture using the Wilton tips and dyes.

How To Decorate: 

How to turn a plain old carrot cake into something special. Like a giant basket with little goodies inside to snack on.

1. You start off splitting the frosting into two, saving 1/3 of it in a small bowl so you can turn it into grass and the other 2/3 in the bowl that you made it in. 
2. In the smaller bowl, you take any kind of light green color, I used Wilton's Leaf Green Gel Icing. You take between an 1/8 of a teaspoon to a 1/4 of a teaspoon of green dye and mix it into the frosting. It should turn into a nice vibrant green color, which is perfect for making grass for the inside of the basket and for the outside.
3. Now, you can either use just a freezer storage bag or a piping bag. I used a clear piping bag and you take a coupler which is just a white top with a screw on ring that holds your tip in place. If you don't have one that's fine, just place your tip in the inside of your bag and cut a small hole on the end so the tip goes through, simple. If you have the coupler, all you need to do is place it in the inside of the bag and mark where it stops, cut that end piece off and pop the coupler through. Attach the Grass Tip (Wilton tip #233) on the outside and hold it in place with the ring and fill up your bag with green frosting, set aside.
4. With the remaining cream cheese frosting, add about 1/4 of a teaspoon of any purple color, or of any color that you prefer. I used Wilton's Violet color for mine. Just either turn on your mixer and combine or just hand stir it in. You should have came out with a nice pastel purple color for the basket.*I actually saved about 2/3 cup of purple frosting into a bowl so I would have filling for the inside of my cake.* Again get your bag ready but use a Basket Weave Tip (Wilton tip #48). Fill it up with the purple frosting and you are ready to pipe. Here are some picture examples that I had found on About.com on how to create the basket weave look for the sides of your cake.
5.  
6. Once you have created the basket weave design all around the sides of your cake, switch the tip to a Closed Star Tip (Wilton tip #30). The closed star tip will give you the effect of the edges of a real weaved basket. All you need to do is hold the piping bag in your hands, keeping your hands close to the tip so you can have a better, sturdier hand while piping. How to create the ridged edge, you need to place the tip near the cake and make a spiral motion, giving the edge a wavy look.
7. Grab the bag of green frosting with the grass tip and hold it upward in the air, right above the top of your cake. Now, just squeeze the bag and pipe straight up, letting the frosting hang loose. Just continue to make a circle around the cake and fill in the center.
8. Continue to hold the piping bag full of green frosting and make some grass along the bottom of the cake platter so it looks like the cake is on the ground.
9. I just went to the store and bought some candy coated chocolate eggs and some milk chocolate bunny's. Just place the bunny's into the cake and decorate the eggs around.
10. With the remaining purple frosting I had just added some more purple dye to it, so I would have a different look for some drop flowers. To create drop flowers, I used the Drop Flower Tip (Wilton tip #129). You hold the bag straight up, give pressure and squeeze out the frosting, letting go at the size that you want by pulling the tip away from the flower. To make the middle of the flower, I switched the grass tip to the round tip (Wilton tip #3). Using the green as an accent to the purple to create the dot in the middle of the flower.
11. Finally, to finish off the cake, all I used were some 5 purple pipe cleaners to create a handle for the basket. Just attach two pipe cleaners together, taking the other two pieces and just wrapping them around the attached ones. Now, just make a bow with the last piece and attach it to the top. Stick the pipe cleaners into the sides of the cake and your done! You have just created a cool basket cake for Easter. Enjoy!