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DigitalGarden: OkaraCarrotCake

おから人参ケーキ Okara Ninjin Carrot Cake

材料 Ingredients

Some Ingredients for Okara Carrot Cake

おから(吉豆腐の) Okara 300g
ナッツメッグ Nutmeg enough
シナモン(肉桂粉) Cinnamon enough
人参(おろした) Carrots(Shredded) 300g
小麦粉(中力) Flour 1 cup
Salt 1 tsp
ベーキングパウダー Baking Powder 8~10g
砂糖(半分てんさい?) sugars(brown;beet…)" 1~cup
菜種油 oil (rapeseed) 1 cup
卵(L+) eggs (large) 4

Another view of some ingredients for Okara NinJin Cake

オーブン、 180° 75分ぐらい 、 取り出しえから、 フォークか長い箸を入れて、 箸を抜けたら生地がついたら、 も少し焼かないといけない。

話 Discussion

This recipe has a lot of leeway. With good ingredients, okara from the local tofu shop, local (more or less) carrots, Kagoshima and Okinawan island brown sugars, Hokkaido beet sugars, nutmeg, two different cinnamons, lots of cinnamon and lots of nutmeg, Japanese rapeseed 菜種油 菜の花!! oil and big local brown eggs: with ingredients like this it's probably hard to fail. It only took 2 or 3 tries for me to rediscover (more or less) how it worked with a recipe I lost 16 or so years ago. Well maybe it will fail if I ever forget the 中力 flour, a little salt, and some baking powder, or to oil the tube pan or something. But after doing this a couple dozen times it's easy to remember, there's a calming rhythm to the whole enterprise.

For the last month or so I've been making at least one of these cakes a week. It feels better to mix in the spices, the nutmeg and the cinnamon during two or three different steps. It's easy to mix in a couple bottle throws of nutmeg and cinnamon (and a spoonful or two of Ceylon Cinnamon!) when it's only the dry ingredients: the flour, the salt, and the baking powder in the big bowl.

An Okara Carrot Cake

The Okara starts off in another bowl, separate from the mixed dry ingredients. Mixing in the nutmeg and cinnamon with the Okara might help disguise an overly healthy-seeming taste for the cake. Lately I take a 300 or 400g weighed bag from the freezer so it need time to thaw. But even with the days Okara it seems like a good idea to break up chunks. While the okara is thawing or getting used to be less chunky the carrots get ground. I squeeze out a little juice to make the cake bake a little faster. It feels bad to siphon of sweetness and nutrients from the people who will share the cake, but the squeezed carrot juice tastes really good! And it's to save electricity!!

It takes some arm strength ("elbow grease"!?!?) to get the carrots (around 4 or 5 big carrots) shredded. I try to weigh each time the shredder tool needs to be emptied out and try to keep track so that the carrot weight becomes about the same as the Okara weight. There's a lot of leeway. With all the cinnamon and nutmeg going in at different stages of the process the okara taste probably won't come through and make people think they might be eating soething healthy in spite of it being a desert sort of thing.

After squeezin some liquid out of the shredded carrots, the shreds need to be spread out a bit too as the get mixed in with the Okara, nutmeg, and cinnamon mix. After matching up the weights of the okara and carrots a few times you probably get a feel for how much shredding you have to do, even if you lose track of the weights: 30g, 55g, 45g... There's a lot of leeway..

Once the carrots are shredded and mixed in with the Okara (with already mixed-in Nutmeg and Cinnamon) it all goes in to the big bowl to be mixed with the dry ingredients (the flour, salt, and baking powder).

Now we're ready to measure out a cup on non-GMO 菜種油 rapeseed oil and beat the 4 big eggs and mix everything into a healthy gooey mess. I start pre-heating the oven to 180C while chopping up some mixed nuts and layering them in as I push the dough (gooey mess) into the tube pan. The first couple times I mixed a 1/4 cup of nuts or maybe more in with the dough, but if some nuts make it to the outside it's harder to slice the cake. now I sprinkle the nuts in towards the middle two or three times hoping to avoid slicing difficulties. I try to get at least 30 slices so it requires more precision than you might expect. Half the time those 30 slices are then sliced in half the other way so that 60 people can get a taste at a large gathering, and people can pace themselves when they see some of the cake made it to the end of the event...

The tube pan with the good ingredients goes into the oven at 180C for 75 minutes or so. One time the eggs were a lot bigger than usual and it seemed like liquid was boiling betweend the cake and the pan. Putting the whole thing back into the oven with the remaining heat seemed to dry it out enough..