carrot cake for 100

If you know me, you might know that I love to bake. All cooking, really, has been a big part of my life for decades, but baking was my first love, from when I was a toddler "helping" my great grandmother make ridiculously overbuttered Russian-Jewish treats in our Soviet kitchen. I made pastries every month for my coworkers' birthdays, brought trays of homemade cookies to neighborhood bars, and painstakingly crafted color-coordinated gum paste flowers to adorn my dad and stepmom's wedding cake. I even tried out for the Great American Baking Show last year, which is a story for another day and a level of kitchen-induced anxiety I'm still recovering from.

I've missed that since I moved here. There's something magical about puttering around a kitchen all day, part mad chemist and part mischievous child, and making something for others (and/or yourself) to enjoy. Apparently it's even a yogic thing, given how fundamental the nourishment in our bellies is to our overall health and vitality. I don't know about all that. I just know it makes me happy and fulfilled in a way I don't care to question. But I don't have daily access to my kitchen and tools and whiz-bang gadgets anymore (NB: I don't actually believe in gadgets. I was once told I would be happy to produce a perfect steak dinner given a sizeable rock and a firepit, and I buy that) and the cheffy part of me was starting to whine.

Here's a thing they don't tell you before you move to the ashram: we get to eat dessert here. Once each week, at Sunday dinner, like ravenous wolves (which is crazy, because we are very well fed) we descend: pear cobbler, wilderness bars, brownies and ice cream -- whatever, skip the dinner line, YOLO, eat dessert first. And sometimes, they let a resident act as "guest chef" and make a dessert for everyone to enjoy.

This week, that guest chef was me. I made carrot cake. So, sooner than anyone anticipated, the descent of this record into unadulterated food porn heaven. Recipe follows.

In what was to be a two-day affair, I started early Saturday morning by assembling ingredients. We begin with prep.

The carrots, finely shredded in a matter of seconds in the "robo", a.k.a. a miniature woodchipper.

I took this opportunity to develop a level of kitchen discipline I have never before exhibited. My mise was totally en place. What's that in the background, you ask? Oh, just a GIANT BOWL OF BREAD DOUGH. I avoided the urge to bury hands and/or face in it. Image of restraint.

If you are baking with dried fruits, you must first plump them. You can do this by steaming, but I prefer to bury them in a mixture of alcohol and jam and let it all get juicy together.

The eggs here are all fresh from local farms and so colorful!

Properly prepared pans are essential. Butter the whole thing, then line the bottom with parchment paper, then butter the paper, then dust the whole thing with sifted flour.

Once you have all of the boring stuff done (I had two wonderful assistants, one eager, one slightly grumpy but equally useful, for the first day of baking), you get to do the fun stuff. And oh my goodness, is it fun to bake in a professional kitchen. I got to use the TWO biggest stand mixers I've ever seen in my life -- the first one is the size of a water cooler. The second is almost as tall as I am and in lieu of a spatula, one uses what can only be described as a canoe paddle to hand-mix in it.

First you gently goopify the butter in the "small" stand mixer, and add the sugar.

Adding the butter-sugar mass to the beaten eggs with the help of a friend.

The sifted dry ingredients (cocoa is the secret to rich carrot cake flavor and color!) get added to the behemoth mixer and ever so delicately stirred in.

And then the carrots and the now-plump dried fruits are hand-canoed in.

It's important to pause for photo breaks while baking with oversized equipment. You know, for posterity. That's the canoe paddle in my hand.

Batter divided evenly(ish) and spread into pans, and ready to bake.

The scariest part of carrot cake for me, because it's so dense and squishy, is getting it out of the pans. We handled it like champs. Oh god. This is a fuckton of cake.

That was it for Day 1. The cakes got tightly wrapped and stored in the creepy freezer downstairs (which is essential for the cakes to chill out and hold springily up to the frosting process, lest you end up with a goopy mess of cake blobs covered in runny icing). I should also mention I was simultaneously participating in a weekend retreat program, running back and forth between the hot kitchen and intense lecture/meditation/asana classes. It's a miracle I can still tell my sacrum from a spatula. On the second day, I baked alone. Yeah, with nobody else. Cause you know, when I bake alone, I prefer to be by myself. Sorry, I promise there will be no further George Thorogood references.

6 lbs of cream cheese, nbd.

It's really important to sift powdered sugar before adding it to the butter and cream cheese. Which is terrible news, because sifting powdered sugar is tedious and painful and sticky.

Butter gets whipped first, then cream cheese beaten in. Don't question my authority on this.

Add a bit of the powdered sugar at a time and mix between additions, or your kitchen (and face) will look like the victims of an anthrax attack.

Once beaten, then fill.

Then top with a second (third, et al) layer and generously frost the outside.

Now comes the fun part. I decided to go with a classic theme of pecans for the nutty version...

... And an even more literal interpretation for the nut-free.

And that's it! The recipe follows.

Carrot Cake
Adapted (my revisions noted) from Maida Heatter's Cakes. Went with the original scale to spare you the trouble of scaling down from my 100 portions.

5 ounces (1 cup) dark raisins, plus a handful of chopped prunes and dried cherries, or whatever dried fruit you have on hand, plumped in a mixture of 2T apricot jam, 2-3T bourbon (I used rice wine today and it turned out great), and 2-3T water
1 pound carrots to make 4 cups shredded, firmly packed
2 cups minus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Dash of nutmeg
Sprinkle of ground cloves or allspice
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
1 c vegetable oil, 1/4c butter, softened (the original recipe calls for all oil, but I find this gives the cake an unpleasant oil flavor, so I sub out some of the oil for butter)
5 1/2 ounces walnuts, medium-coarse chop

Cream Cheese Icing, recipe follows

a handful of pecan halves, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter three 9-inch cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment, and butter the parchment. Dust sifted flour into the pans and tap out the excess.

Plump the raisins and fruit as directed by placing in a saucepan over medium-low heat until boiling, cover, and set aside to cool.

Grate the carrots using a food processor (any size grate works! really!) or a standing metal grater. Measure and set aside.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and spices, and cocoa, and set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugars. Separately, beat the eggs, then beat in the butter and sugars. Add the vanilla and oil, and mix until well combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low speed only until combined. Stir in the carrots, raisins, and nuts.

Divide the batter evenly among the three pans and use a spatula to even out the batter. Bake the pans for 35 to 40 minutes or until the tops just spring back when gently pressed with a fingertip and the cakes begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the oven and let stand 2-3 minutes in the pans on a cooling rack. Run a small knife around the perimeter of the cake and invert the cakes onto a cooling rack and allow to cool completely. It is not necessary to remove the parchment from the bottoms of the cakes at this time.

Brush any stray crumbs from the sides of the cakes and transfer the cakes to the freezer, unwrapped, for at least an hour, or until cakes are firm enough to handle. If you wish to freeze the cakes longer, wrap the frozen layers in plastic wrap and return to the freezer until you are ready to frost the cake. Do not thaw the layers before icing.

When ready to ice the cake, prepare a large, flat cake plate by lining it with four strips of wax paper to make a square. This wax paper will catch any crumbs and icing while frosting the cake. Remove the parchment paper from the bottoms of the cakes. Place one cold and firm cake layer upside down on the plate. Spread a thin layer (2/3 cup) of the icing evenly over the cake. Cover with the second layer, also upside down. Spread another 2/3 cup icing over the second layer. Place the third layer on top, also upside down and spread the remaining icing over the top and sides of the cake. Remove the wax paper strips carefully. Garnish the cake with pecan halves. Refrigerate the cake for a few hours or for a day or two. Serve cold right from the refrigerator.

Cream Cheese Icing

16 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
4 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
1/4 t salt

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter, then add the cream cheese and beat until soft and smooth with no lumps. On low speed beat in the vanilla and sugar, adding the sugar 1/2c at a time, and then on high speed beat for a few moments until smooth.

Origin story

This week, I thought I might give you a break from the present moment to take this story back to its beginning. An origin story of sorts, if you'll allow me the brief fantasy of painting myself as a comic book hero (not sure what my superpower would be. Awkwardness? Operational excellence? Having killer outfits but being otherwise useless in battle?). Incidentally, if you ask anyone at the Himalayan Institute how they came to live here, they inevitably respond with a rich, colorful tale full of unlikely coincidences and fateful encounters, the sort that belongs in a coming-of-age movie or a Salman Rushdie novel. It is often said (and I repeat here with no judgement) that the Institute has a way of attracting exactly the person it needs at the right time. Like some kind of great dharma magnet (which would also make an excellent comic book world-domination-device).

My story begins in August 2015. I was the Chief Financial Officer of a hedge fund in Berkeley, CA, living the San Francisco dream in a South of Market loft, performing feats of accounting and operational wizardry by day and dancing to techno by night. Through a series of events random enough to deserve their own origin story, I decided to attend my first yoga teacher training with Rusty Wells (with whom I had never practiced before the first day of training). Those 10 days broke my heart open and changed my life in more ways than I can adequately express here, but critical to this story is a guest lecturer Rusty had invited to teach us about proper breathing, relaxation, and pranayama (breath/energy control) techniques. I'd been a dedicated yoga practitioner for about 8 years at that point, but the way this man (Luke Ketterhagen) talked about the diaphragm gave me the sort of fluttery chills you only get when you discover a vast new category of knowledge you're truly passionate about. Like finding out there's a parallel universe and being given the key to the door between that world and your own. Luke talked about a place, a school, an ashram, where everyone was as nerdy about this stuff as he was, and he exuded equal parts giddy, infectious excitement and profound, grounded kindness. The bell in the back of my mind (you know, the one that tells you to sit up and listen because a major plot point is coming in the story of your life) tinkled to indicate some gear had just fallen into place. Naturally, I shoved that bell back in its box and told it, "not now, it's not convenient". And to be fair, there were still important things to do where I was: I kept practicing and started teaching yoga, I helped my company grow and flourish, I implemented a yoga program at work. 

Luke and me in 2017

But the next year, I did another training with Rusty, and there was Luke again. The bell jangled louder. Back in the box it went. Work got stressful, conflict increased, initiatives were met with seemingly inexplicable roadblocks. I found myself wondering what my path was supposed to look like, and whether I was still on the right track. That December, I took a trip to Mauritius (fun fact: Mauritius is the antipod of San Francisco on a globe -- I literally could not get any farther away from home than where I went. Telling of my mental state at the time?) and decided to bring the Bhagavad Gita along as my beach reading. In case you're not familiar, the Gita is a seminal piece of Hindu scripture that focuses on the themes of duty (dharma), devotion, and the practice of yoga. There are literally dozens of high-quality English translations of this text, but for whatever reason and through the magic of the Amazon recommendation engine, the first one I happened to read was Swami Satchidananda's The Living Gita. Near the end, in the commentary accompanying verse 18.47, which reads:

 It is better to do your own dharma imperfectly than to excel at another's dharma. Whoever accepts the duties of his own nature is free from sin.

I found a most curious passage, one that seemed to be written directly to me. Below is a picture of that passage:

At this point I'm pretty sure I threw down the book, grabbed my friend's arm, and started babbling incoherently about burning bushes. 

Nevertheless, I returned home, went back to work, and a couple of months passed. By this time, a cascade of issues at the office came to a head with me at the center. Whether or not they were actually a big deal in the grand scheme of things isn't as relevant as the fact that it served as a major wake-up call for me to make some changes in my management style and the ways I handled stress. Around that time, I was idly browsing the Himalayan Institute website and came across an opening for a residential staff role: Bookkeeper.

Okay, Universe, I thought. You win.

Nearly a year after that, after two visits to HI, much wringing of hands and many two-columned lists, and a lot of transition planning, I arrived. And the rest is yet to unfold.

welcome to somewhere

As much as someone could ever truly land somewhere, I have landed. I've spent a week building, arranging, acclimating, working, communing, eating, organizing, cleaning, laughing, enjoying, struggling, trying, practicing, reading... in short, living. Here, in my new home. And in that week, I've begun to feel like this IS a home, my home; I have a home, and it is here.

My room, in it's mostly finished state. I didn't even pick the purple wall! It just came that way.

So far, I've been spending my mornings working in veggie prep (peeling, chopping, and rinsing vegetables in the kitchen to get them ready for the cooks to use), with afternoons free to settle in and contemplate. It's been the right pace for me, since a) I only operate at one speed and so am completely physically drained by the time lunch comes around, and b) I hadn't really taken stock of how exhausted I was from the nonstop working-packing-moving show that my life has been for the last couple of months. The kitchen is staffed with an eclectic mix of locals from the surrounding towns (including a troupe of astonishingly sweet guys in a program that trains special needs folks for full-time jobs, who have love lives far more colorful than my own and who know an awful lot about Marvel comics and Nickelodeon cartoons), some long-time Institute residents who came here after they retired and have 20 years worth of stories and gossip, and a French-Canadian chef who is equally versed in Ayurvedic principles and Tartine sourdough bread. The food is nourishing and healthy; there's dairy and hearty protein and the aforementioned delicious bread and butter served with every meal, and though we get our veggies on trucks like everyone else, I've seen firsthand how fresh the produce is and how picky we are in selecting only the tasty bits for our dishes. After a couple of weeks of working here, I'll transition into my more permanent role on the business side of things, which might include work for the creative/marketing team as well as the finance group.

Practicing in one of the many beautiful yoga spaces available on campus.

If there's a recurring theme so far, it's one of pleasant surprises. From immediately finding a group of dudes not unlike any other nerdy friendgroup I've had in the past, to the fact that people in ashrams like Dungeons & Dragons and Game of Thrones and the occasional pizza and beer on the weekend, to the candor with which people here talk about everything from past Himalayan Institute scandals to current struggles with Parkinson's, it seems like every day brings a new sigh of relief or giggle of delight. It's not that I wasn't hoping for all of this, it's more the dawning realization that I'm in the right place. That the voice in the back of my head that whispered, then pestered, then screamed that this move was the right decision... wasn't wrong. My intuition, as it turns out (again), doesn't eff around. I am way less anxious and my moods are more stable since I've arrived. Even my skin looks better. That's not to say there aren't things I miss; with a program steeped in traditional meditation techniques and a daily yoga class schedule that has to accommodate a range of abilities and includes the elderly, I've had to supplement with a more vigorous and rigorous home practice. I'm having trouble making it to morning and evening group meditations in our shrine. There are communal eating and shared shower situations to acclimate to, and (like with any new company or city) local politics to navigate. But through it all, people have been genuine, and warm, and welcoming, and I feel, even in this completely foreign situation and surrounded by new faces, pretty darn safe. Maybe more safe than I have in a while. And when you have a stable and rooted base, all kinds of upward, outward, and unexpected growth happens.

I am here. I am open. And truly, I am ready.