Carrot cake

***Before reading this see note about fuck ups***

Okay, so this is the carrot cake that didn't go so well.
It did taste great, and was eaten whole before I had time to take the 'after' picture (before pic coming up), since one of the things that went wrong was that it had collapsed. The other thing was that no matter how long I baked it, it wouldn't bake. I mean, the confusing thing was that after about 30 minutes the toothpick I stuck into it came out dry, but when I cut a piece it wasn't cooked yet, so I put it back in, and after a while took it out again, cut another piece, and it still wasn't ready. The third time I just gave up and decided to eat it as is. Sadly I made it mainly to impress my new roommates, which didn't really happen, but as I said, it did taste good. Here's the recipe, and a few things I'm going to do differently next time.



- 3 carrots finely grated.
- 3 apples finely grated (a trick I learned that allows you to put less fat in the cake, however this may have been one of the reasons it was so wet, next time I'm gonna squeeze the juice out of them after grating them).
- Zest and juice from 1 orange.
- Cup of sugar.
- 2.5 cups white flour.
- Tbs baking powder.
- 1 can of cream (I'm never sure what's double cream or heavy cream etc, so the one you use to make whipped cream).
- Cinnamon
- 50g melted unsalted butter.
- 3 eggs.


Preparation:

- Preheat oven to 180C

- I separated the eggs, and whipped the egg whites, this causes the cake to have a crust, but it's nor really necessary, I just discovered I like separating eggs, and since I have so little to do, the time I spent whipping them was just right for me.
If you do separate them, whip the yolks with the sugar and butter, then add cream, and leave the whites for later. If not, just do the same with the whole eggs.
- Mix the flour with the baking powder.
- Add the eggs, cream and sugar mix, stir, and then add the grated fruits and orange juice and zest.
- Stir as little as possible! You don't want your flour to start producing gluten, it will make your cake tough and bread-like.
- If you separated the eggs, this would be the time to gently fold in the whites.

Bake at 180C for 40 minutes.

***
This is more or less how made it. However, as I said, it came out wet, so, next time, I'm going to do two things differently, first, I'm going to squeeze all the juice out of the apples and carrots, i hope it'll work.
More importantly, I'm going to bake it at a lower temperature, 160C, for way longer, about an hour, now, I'm guessing that the top will already by cooked after 30 minutes, so I'll just cover it with foil.

What causes cakes to collapse is opening the oven, I knew that so I didn't open it, but I did take it out two times and put it back in, which I guess is way worse. Don't do it.

How it looked when I first took it out:


Any educated suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

P.S.
Yesterday I gave my mom the recipe without telling her it went wrong, I trust her to magically make it work, so I'm going to wait until she makes it and tell me it was good, and then figure out what she did differently.

Uri.