Carrot Cake

   We celebrated my boss's birthday recently. I brought a present. One of my other coworkers brought the cake. We didn't know exactly what kind of cake she likes. We knew she wasn't a big chocolate fan and we weren't sure about vanilla. One of the techs did remember that she picked carrot cupcakes for her wedding. We decided on carrot.
   It turns out that the two techs and I are fans of carrot cake. Friday I worked with our tech Kelly. There was still some birthday cake left so we each had a piece. While we were eating and working we talked about carrot cake. We discussed various carrot cakes we had eaten. We discussed the additions of pineapple, coconut, raisins, and nuts to the cake. We both prefer our cake without pineapple, raisins, and coconut. Kelly prefers her cake nut free. I'm ok with nuts.
   Both of us agree that cream cheese frosting is the best. Kelly said she used to get a frosting mix from the store, but once she realized how easy it was to make homemade, she never did it again. For my second wedding (to C), I had a carrot cake. I can't remember what kind of frosting it had on it, but it was good and it was beautiful. I've had carrot cake with a whipped cream frosting. I didn't like it. It was probably the only time I've scraped the frosting off of a piece of cake.
   I decided to look up the history of carrot cake. I've always been interested in the history of things, especially food. It turns out that there is a carrot museum website online. It seems that no one is quite sure of exactly when carrot cake was discovered. The theory is that carrot cake descended from medieval carrot puddings. Sweeteners were expensive and hard to come by so carrots were used as a sugar substitute.  I  never knew that. The museum cites a recipe for a carrot tea cake served to George Washington in the 1700s. The website shows two recipes from the 1800s. I read them and they make no sense to me.
   There are many reasons why I like carrot cake. It's easy to make and not that expensive. Most of the time it tastes better the second or third day. (should it last that long) You can freeze carrot cake and it tastes just fine when you thaw it out. We froze the top layer of our second wedding cake to eat a year later. It was just as good or maybe better than it was when it was fresh. I've even been known to eat carrot cake for breakfast. (Why not, people eat sugary donuts and pastries for breakfast.)
   It's amazing how a humble root vegetable can make something so good.