Carrot Cake Muffins with White Chocolate Icing

"Symbolically speaking, carrots have always been associated with wealth, due to their golden sheen: a popular Jewish dish for New Year around here is a special kind of cymes that consists of carrot slices fried in honey to give them the appearance of golden coins. These were believed to bring fortune and prosperity in the coming year."

All this is what I wrote when I first put up the carrot cake recipe up on KW, back in 2011. Scary how long ago that was. Also scary how unsure of it I was, back then, and how I wrote it doesn't work sometimes and yadda yadda. Well, don't listen to past me. It works great, and for that reason I will update the recipe and post the new, improved version: Carrot Muffins for a prosperous New Year!
Of course, you don't have to make muffins, but there's something great about them - the small, individual bits of goodness have a charm all of her own, they're like little talismans of taste.

Ingredients

These should all be measured with the same container. It doesn't matter if you use a glass, a cup or your Grandma's beer stein, as long as you stick to it. (Well, okay, it does matter because the bigger container you use, the more cake mixture you get, but I don't think you need to be told that.)

• Grated carrot - one glass
• Flour - one glass
• Sugar or Honey - two-thirds of a glass if you use sugar, half of a glass if honey. The amount of sweetener can be modified to suit individual taste, but there has to be some of it, and no more than one glass, because you will screw up the proportions.
• Oil - half a glass
• Eggs - two
• Baking soda - two teaspoons
• Cocoa powder - one teaspoon
• Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Cardamom

Tools

• Muffin tray

Preparation

This is the beautiful part - just take a big bowl and mix it all up. Seriously, that's it: the only bit of actual work you put into this recipe is peeling and grating the carrots. After that, you only need to bring the ingredients into contact. The best way is to mix all the dry ingredients first: flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder and, for the purposes of this recipe, carrots, and then add the wet ingredients until you have a thick, oily mass.

Then you just put it in the muffin tray and bake. The temperature should be between 180 and 200 Celsius (365 to 392 Farenheit).

Now, for the white chocolate icing. This is also quite simple, and boils down to melting whitechocolate, preferably in a double-boiler, and mixing it with a bit of cream, oil or butter to make it smoother. I've heard people say it's possible to just melt the chocolate, pour it out while hot, and leave it to settle back again, but the one I used didn't work on its own. This probably depends on the quality of the chocolate - if you buy some extra creamy uber-goodness from Lindt, it might spread out on the cake of its own free will. Then again, why would you waste that to make icing, I don't know.
Just melt the chocolate and add your "smoothener" with a teaspoon, in small portions, until you get the desired thickness. (Thick cream works best, then butter, oil last.)

So if you want to draw prosperity in for the new year, there's worse ways you could do it than preparing these. Add some fitting drinks, like orange liquor perhaps, and you're golden.