(light acoustic folk music) (chocolate pieces rattling) - Hello, everyone, and welcome back.

Today, we're making a carrot cake that takes me straight back to the '90s when I couldn't wait to study every page of a certain magazine and watch every episode of a certain television show with very hopeful yet delusional aspirations of making everything look as perfect as, yes, you guessed it, Martha Stewart.

I watched her make this vegetable garden-inspired carrot cake and thought, "Sure, I can do that."

And today we're channeling that energy with tiny marzipan vegetables and just enough confidence to be dangerous.

So pull up a chair, pour yourself something lovely to sip, and let's do this together.

(bright acoustic folk music) (bright acoustic folk music continues) (light acoustic folk music) So to get us started on our carrot cake, the first thing we need to do is preheat our oven 350 degrees and then prep our pan.

That's looking good.

I've cut a piece of parchment paper to the size of our pan, and I am going to place it so that I have two (parchment paper rustling) longer sides here that are going to be outside of our pan.

(parchment paper rustling) And that way, too, it'll help, so I can lift the cake up by my little handles here.

And that just sticks nicely to our cake release.

But now I'm just gonna take a little bit more and just make sure that I've got some of the cake release on the parchment paper itself.

Awesome.

All right, set it aside, and let's start with our dry ingredients.

We have flour, all-purpose, baking soda, baking powder, and our fabulous spices.

So we have cinnamon, we have ginger, and we have a little bit of salt into the mix.

And last but not least, my favorite, nutmeg.

(nutmeg scraping) We're just going to grate some in.

(grater tapping) Oh, my gosh, I love the smell of this nutmeg.

All right, let's whisk that together (whisk scraping) and set it aside.

And we're gonna move on to our wet ingredients: vegetable oil (oil splashing) and four eggs at room temperature.

(egg cracking) To this now we are adding granulated sugar, brown sugar, a little bit of vanilla extract.

And before we add our crushed pineapple, I just wanna give this a good little whisk to make sure I break up those eggs and get our sugars incorporated as much as possible.

(whisk tapping) Looking good!

Next up, crushed pineapple, which I have drained.

And then I took some paper towels and got a lot of the excess moisture from the pineapple juice.

I took that off because, although definitely the pineapple will add moisture to our cake, we don't want it to add so much moisture that it just gets all gloopy inside and never really fully bakes.

So let's get that mixed in.

(whisk scraping) Looking good.

And now our star ingredient, our carrots.

And I just took these carrots and put them through a food processor to grate them.

You can hand-grate them if you want.

The one thing that I will recommend that you not do is use those already grated carrots that you can buy in the grocery store, because those tend to be on the drier side.

So this way, you get the beauty of the moisture and the freshness by using just carrots that you grate yourself.

Now we're going to put our wet ingredients into our dry, get all of our sugary, carroty, pineappley goodness into our bowl.

And now, using a spatula, we're just going to combine our wet with our dry ingredients.

And before I get the flour totally incorporated, don't forget your nuts.

The recipe calls for walnuts, but my favorite are pecans.

And so that's what I'm using here, pecans, but you choose what you like best.

And now let's get them mixed in.

All right, looking good.

Into our prepared pan.

Spread it out so that's all nice and even.

Into our preheated 350-degree oven it goes.

So I'm gonna leave that in there for about 35 minutes.

But somewhere around the 20-minute mark, I'm gonna check it.

If it's getting too brown, I'm gonna cover with some aluminum foil.

(birds chirping) (light acoustic folk music) While our cake is baking, it's time to make our cream cheese icing.

For the icing that I like, which might be a little controversial, I swap the ratio between cream cheese and butter.

So I like more butter and less cream cheese.

But if you like your cream cheese icing tangier, by all means reverse it.

Eight ounces.

So two sticks of butter.

When I add the cream cheese, it's four ounces of cream cheese.

(stand mixer whirring) (light acoustic folk music) What I'm going to do is add our sugar, but not all of it.

So I'm gonna add half.

I am going to add a teaspoon or so, I'm just gonna eyeball it, of vanilla extract.

And a pinch of salt.

We are covering this baby up, but I still end up making a mess anyway.

We'll cover up now.

And I'll lock it.

And wish me luck.

(stand mixer whirring) Okay, we're ready for the last half of our sugar.

Into the bowl.

Just gonna scrape some of the icing from the sides of the bowl and cover us up again.

(stand mixer whirring) Looking good.

And now, last but not least, we're gonna add our cream cheese.

(stand mixer whirring) Ooh, look at how nice and creamy our icing is looking.

And so now I'm just going to scrape down the bowl and set it aside.

And we're going to wait until our cake is all cool and ready to ice.

(light acoustic folk music continues) Did you know there is a difference between marzipan and almond paste?

Almond paste has less sugar, more almonds.

It's coarser in texture, and it is meant to be baked into desserts.

While marzipan is sweeter and smoother, and it's meant to be shaped onto desserts.

And if you accidentally pick up almond paste in the store, you can turn it into marzipan by just kneading in some extra powdered sugar and a little bit of corn syrup.

And now comes the fun part: turning a little almond and sugar into tiny vegetables for the top of our cake.

So here's our marzipan.

And as you can see, it's a little bit on the creamy yellow side, so we need to consider that now as we color our marzipan.

I'm gonna show you how I color it for a realistic green for our vegetables.

We're gonna just take off a piece as much as you think you probably are going to need, give or take.

And always, always, always get yourself some gloves, unless you want your hands to look whatever color it is that you're coloring your marzipan.

(gloves rustling) It's never really a good look.

(clapping) All right.

So gloves on.

So I'm just gonna gently... There, one drop of my moss green.

And now for this leaf green, I am going to take a toothpick, and I'm just gonna scoop a little bit of this color.

And these are gel-based colors, by the way, that I just got online.

So all I'm gonna do here is just kind of massage it into our marzipan, hence why you need the gloves.

And sometimes, 'cause the marzipan itself, it's definitely moldable, but it also can get sticky.

And when you're adding this little bit of extra gel, it could make it even stickier, obviously.

So I have in a bowl here, just a little bit of vegetable shortening.

And if I can't, like, work it enough to keep it from my gloves, I'll just dip in a little bit of the shortening and kind of make it like a little lotion for my gloves.

I think this is looking good.

So we're just gonna put this aside now and get our other marzipan colors ready and get our other supplies so that we can make some vegetables.

The first vegetable we're making today will be the carrots, because carrot cake, right?

So let's start with our carrots.

I'm gonna take my marzipan, get it started in the shape of like a little cone where one end is a little bit more narrow than the top.

And then just go ahead and put my toothpick into my marzipan, and then shape it.

So I'm liking the way that looks.

And so here's the start of our carrot.

Now we need our little greenery, our little carrot tops here.

So to do that, I'm just gonna take... I have a little tool here.

It's just a little fondant tool.

And now I'm just gonna take some of that green that we made, and then we're just gonna roll it, making it a little bit more narrow on the one end because that's the end that we're going to insert it in.

Just to be a little bit on the safe side, I am using a little... This is just a little paintbrush, only used for food.

And what I have here is vanilla extract.

And this is what we're going to use as our glue.

So I'm just gonna dab the inside of my carrot top.

And now insert our green.

And now the last finishing touch is I'm just taking a little paring knife, and we're just gonna separate out the top to make it look like the leafy greenery carrot tops that we have.

And then the last bit for our realistic-looking carrot is, you know, how carrots have those little lines in them.

So I'm just taking my knife and just gently pressing and twisting to get my little lines throughout my carrot.

And voila.

There you have it.

One carrot done.

Let's make some tomatoes.

I have red.

We're just gonna make our little round red tomatoes.

Again, they don't have to be perfectly round 'cause tomatoes aren't perfectly round.

But now we're gonna take our green again.

Just a small piece; we don't need a lot.

And we're gonna press it out.

And then for our tomatoes, I have this little cutter, looks like a star.

And all I'm gonna do is cut some shapes out.

This is, like, so incredibly easy.

Just attach it by pressing in tomatoes!

You know, every one of these is, like, my little baby.

And the first time I did these potatoes, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, how can there be any more beautiful little vegetable out of marzipan in the world than these potatoes?"

Plain marzipan, not colored at all.

And took a little piece and rolled it kind of... It looks like, you know, a potato shape, a little oval.

Take a toothpick and make the little eyes, and just poke in random holes.

And here is the totally cool part.

All I'm gonna do is take a little bit of cocoa powder and just gently dust each one of the potatoes.

And then you can use your finger.

I like to use just another little clean brush and just brush the cocoa powder all over this little potato.

And scope that out, guys!

Does that not look like a perfectly delicious Idaho potato?

Next up, I just wanna show you how to make these broccoli!

Aw!

(laughs) Come on!

All right.

They're really easy.

Let me show you.

Grab your green, a little brighter green here for our broccoli.

So I'm just gonna take off a piece.

I'm gonna start to shape it with a stem.

All I'm doing is just kind of shaping it with that little bit of a ball there on top and a stem.

So now we're just gonna cut pieces of our broccoli here, just like that, and kind of start to shape them a little bit into little rounded areas.

And then add little green balls right up to the top.

And now this is going to be the really cool part, 'cause you might think, "Well, that's kind of looks like broccoli."

But no, in order to give it the texture that we see on fresh broccoli, I have here just some green-colored sugar.

It's leftover from Christmas.

Cookie decorations, I'm sure.

And just go ahead and kind of roll it gently into your sugar.

(light acoustic folk music) Look at that broccoli.

Is that not the coolest thing?

And just because this might be too much for some of you guys, if you'd prefer, you can purchase already-made little veggies online, and you can decorate to your heart's content with already-made vegetables.

(gentle acoustic folk music) (gentle acoustic folk music continues) (gentle acoustic folk music continues) So, just putting the little finishing icing touches here, and we are ready to do the fun part, which is decorating.

I'm not just doing this kind of willy-nilly, but I actually made up a little plan for where my veggies are going to go.

The other thing that we have that we haven't mentioned is I went ahead and made these little pickets because the very last touch will be to put up a picket fence around our garden.

These are not marzipan, though, just so you know.

I actually use gum paste, and I chose it because it hardens, right?

So this isn't going anywhere.

This isn't morphing or moving.

The only downside to gum paste is you really can't eat it.

So keep that in mind if you're making it.

I know I won't let anyone take a big bite out of the gum paste fence, but it just makes for a very pretty picket.

Enough talking.

Let's get to decorating.

So I'm just going to look at my actual plan here and make myself some marks.

So my walkway.

Or I should say, my grassy area.

And again, not necessarily... I'm not worried about making straight, perfectly edged lines, but it just gives me a guide.

Okay, I'm happy with that.

Now, I am just using some green jimmies, and I am just going to gently place them here on my icing.

Okay, I think we can fill in more of the grass as we need to, but I think we've got a good start there for our garden path.

And next up, we're going to put our dirt on.

Our dirt is just crushed-up chocolate cookie wafers.

So, now let's put some dirt on each of our four sections.

(gentle acoustic folk music continues) So, okay!

Now we get to do our garden.

We're gonna start with these little leeks.

I don't think you guys... We didn't demo these leeks, but you can call them a green onion if you want.

We're gonna just put those in this section of our garden here.

These are another little veggie that we didn't demo.

These are bell peppers.

A little cauliflower.

And then we have our tomatoes.

Let's put our sunflowers in.

We've got little baby eggplant.

Get this guy here because here we're going to put our fun potatoes, and these guys, I'm just gonna kind of stack up on top of each other.

Carrot cake.

Here are our carrots.

I want these guys to just look like they're popping out of the ground there.

Last but not least, our really fun broccoli.

(light acoustic folk music) Oh, my gosh.

And if you thought that I would stop just at veggies, think again, because I found online this darling birdbath, which we're gonna put right in the center of our cake.

And what would be a garden without some bunnies?

So I have a little bunny that's gonna be hanging out with our leeks and our peppers, and another little bunny.

Oh, I think we're gonna put this guy, maybe?

Let's put him over here by the carrots.

So our pickets, in order for them to stick well, I've just got a little bit of corn syrup here, and I am just going to brush it very lightly onto our picket.

And remember, this is our opening to our garden.

So I wanna leave a little more space here than I will in between my other little pickets.

And now I'm just gonna go around the cake, continuing to put a little bit of our corn syrup or glue on.

Last one.

(light acoustic folk music continues) And now one last finishing touch, our gravel around our garden.

And these are just pieces of chocolate that I got online.

(chocolate pieces rattling) (gentle acoustic folk music) Voila!

I love it.

I hope you do too.

The marzipan garden is planted.

And now the only question is, do you think Martha would approve?

I think she might.

Thanks for spending this time in the kitchen with me.

I had so much fun making this cake.

I can't believe I waited so long to give it a try.

See you next time.

(gentle acoustic folk music continues) (gentle acoustic folk music continues) (gentle acoustic folk music continues)