I’ve recently sent out my next book, Demonic Summoning for the Modern Gardener, to beta readers. It’s a more fleshed out tale than my husband read and commented on last month. A few weeks ago, I mentioned on the blog that my husband had requested more carrot cake in the story. In my rewrite after his comments, I made chasing the perfect carrot cake a sort of running gag/tiny subplot through the book.

Then I decided I should include the perfect carrot cake recipe in the back of the book.

I had already developed the perfect carrot cake recipe, so that was easy to include. But the frosting … I’ve made some very good carrot cake frostings, but I can’t say I’ve hit on the perfect frosting. Everyone agrees, of course, that carrot cake must be frosted with a cream cheese frosting, but there’s a lot of variation among cream cheese frostings. I’ve had them too sweet, too grainy, too dense …

No better excuse for baking!

So last night I whipped up a carrot cake and tested out a new variation on cream cheese frosting. This one has no butter—just cream cheese as the fat. It also contains lemon zest and lemon juice for a bit of added tartness. Lots of potential to be awesome!

Flavour-wise, it’s good … the texture, not so much. It’s too gummy. Not fluffy enough. Definitely not the perfect frosting.

But never fear, we’ll suffer through this almost perfect cake (have I mentioned that I’ve had two pieces of it already, and it’s been only 12 hours?), and then I’ll make another!

Because I couldn’t let my readers down with sub-standard carrot cake, now could I?

If you have a favourite cream cheese frosting, let me know—maybe I’ll try it out. How many cakes do you think it will take to reach peak frosting?