Cheese Cake

Today I made a cheese cake. Not a cheesecake, but a cheese cake. A cheese-like cake. A cake that looks like cheese.

There was an occasion for this cake. It was Mike’s birthday, and his 23^rd year needed to be celebrated in some suitably sophisticated way. And just in time, the perfect plan dawned on me: a cake designed to look like a wheel of brie.

A little back-story: Mike came home from work a few weeks ago with a nine-pound wheel of brie in his backpack. His employer, it turned out, had decided that cheese was now an acceptable form of remuneration for his hard work. I’ve never seen myself in the film industry, but the pay scale does seem attractive.

Nine pounds of brie was almost more than our refrigerator could handle, but we dutifully (and happily) whittled away at the wheel at an impressive pace. Even with our enthusiasm for brie and crackers, brie sandwiches, brie quesadillas, and just plain brie, it’s taken almost a month to get down to the last wedge, and I don’t think any of us will be running out to buy more for a while. So I figured that coming home to something that looked like another huge wheel of brie would make an impression.

For the cake, I used a simple recipe for carrot cake, omitting the pecans in the original and adding coconut instead. Since I didn’t have a round cake pan, I had to do a little engineering to create a circular cake. After baking the cake in a rectangular sheet pan and letting it cool, I inverted it onto a wooden board and used a paper plate as a template to cut out two semi-circles. After sliding them into place, I covered the cake with cream cheese frosting and adorned the top with some customized and very convincing cheese labels, carefully Photoshopped by Chase. A bunch of grapes on the side of the cutting board completed the effect.

I was thrilled that the final product turned out so realistically cheesy, but I didn’t expect to have discovered such a deliciously moist carrot cake. I’ll be going back to this recipe for all kinds of occasions in the future, for trompe-l’oeil purposes and otherwise.

Carrot Cake

4 eggs

1 ¼ cups vegetable oil

3 cups grated carrot

1 ½ cups sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease and flour a 9 X 13 inch baking pan. Beat eggs, sugar,vegetable oil, and vanilla together. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Stir in carrots and coconut. Pour into baking pan, and bake for 40-50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

For frosting: beat together 1/2 cup butter, 8 ounces cream cheese (both at room temperature), 4 cups confectioners sugar, and one teaspoon vanilla or other flavoring.