Order carrot cake in New Zealand and you know what arrives. Brown, spiced, slightly dense, walnuts through it, a thick cap of cream cheese icing. A good cake. Also, from a Brazilian point of view, a different food that happens to share a name.
What Brazilians mean by carrot cake
Bolo de cenoura is bright orange. Not beige with orange flecks: properly, almost alarmingly orange, because the carrots go into the blender raw with the oil and eggs, not grated and folded through. The colour comes out of the blender.
No cinnamon. No nutmeg, no walnuts, no raisins, no cream cheese. Take the spice away and the carrot is left, sweeter and greener than the spice cabinet allowed for.
And then chocolate
Instead of icing, warm chocolate brigadeiro goes over the top. A slow-cooked condensed milk caramel, it sets to a soft glossy layer, tacky under a finger. Chocolate on carrot cake sounds wrong to a New Zealand palate. In São Paulo it is entirely normal.
The crumb underneath is light and clean. Nothing heavy, nothing spiced. Put that glaze on a spiced walnut cake and it would collapse into sweetness. More on brigadeiro in our piece on it.
Ours
Our Brazilian Carrot Cake comes two ways. A 25cm bundt at $55 serving 16, architectural on a table. Or a 20cm loaf at $35 serving 8, easy to slice at home. Want to test the theory first? A single slice sits in the cabinet.
One detail at checkout: the carrot is one of three cakes carrying a No Added Dairy preference. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur.
The everyday cake category
Bundts and loaves are the most useful thing we make and the least celebrated. Not a centrepiece. Just a very good cake to have in the house on a Tuesday, sitting under a tea towel, cut at half past nine by somebody who came in for a glass of water. The category lives in tea cakes and loaves and bundt cakes.
Alongside the carrot: Apple Crumble with its buttery crumble base, Marble, Jaffa Orange Chocolate, and Cuca Banana, its streusel top crumbling away from the knife.
Which carrot cake is better?
Wrong question. They answer different briefs. The spiced version is an autumn cake that wants a cup of tea beside it. The Brazilian one is lighter, works year-round, and is considerably better at breakfast, a use case the cream-cheese school never solved.
The rest of the Brazilian menu
If this one lands, the same tradition gives you pudim caramel flan, cold and wobbling in a pool of dark syrup, the Anthill coconut bundt, the Romeo & Juliet cheesecake, and the corn and peanut cakes we make for Festa Junina.
Coming to get one
Made to order, like everything else. Order online and pick a collection date at least two days out. Or come in for a slice and a coffee: we are inside The Welder on Welles Street, and every order is collected here because we do not deliver. Open 10am to 6pm Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 3pm Saturday. Full menu here.
