Carrot-Beet-Apple Cake

As I said yesterday, our Cake of Three Lies is (loosely) based on a triple-layer carrot cake with cream cheese frosting from Epicurious. (You may remember that we have difficulty following recipe directions around here.)

Here are the deviations the chef could remember.

1. We substituted 1/2 cup Sucanat for 1/2 cup sugar for molasses flavor and because we're co-opy like that. You could use brown sugar or molasses instead.

2. We added grated fresh ginger. (Cook's note: Our recent innovation is keeping ginger in the freezer and grating it on a Microplane.)

3. The recipe calls for 3 cups of grated carrots. We had several very wilted carrots that were not of firm enough resolve to be grated. Minced, they made about 1 scant cup.

4. For the other 2 cups of carrots, we substituted 1 cup of grated beets and 1 cup of grated apples.

5. We added some shredded coconut.

6. We substituted walnuts for the pecans.

7. We used 1 cup of cake flour in place of 1 cup of the regular flour.

8. The recipe makes a huge amount of frosting. (We made two single-layer rectangular cakes rather than a triple-layer round cake.) So we halved the recipe, and because we were short on cream cheese, substituted French vanilla yogurt for part of it.