Greg’s favorite cake is carrot cake, and some of the best we’ve enjoyed are the classic Cook’s and  NY Times recipes. When I asked him what he wanted for his birthday this year, there was no surprise it was carrot cake. 

I found this recipe at How Sweet Eats, which is very similar. Like the Cook's & NYT versions, it’s incredibly moist and sweet in its flavors. But it's a bit different in that it includes pistachios (roasted, unsalted). I took that and made a few additional changes. 

I baked the cake in a Pyrex glass pan rather than fiddling around trying to find 3 matching layer cake pans. In fact, I am convinced not making a layered cake was part of its moist success—something that the build-a-cake approach of the Cook's recipe implicitly suggests. I used the Sciabica’s Buttery & Sweet olive oil. [If you can get the olio nuovo version, even better!] It's what we use to pop our brown butter truffle popcorn, and as much as we have tried olive oil from all over the world, there is nothing quite like it. For this cake, it did something special for the texture, flavor, and moistness.

And…, I improved the frosting by adding zest of orange in the mix as well as on top. Lastly, I toasted raw pistachios, chopped not too finely, and used them in the cake batter and again as a sprinkle on top of the frosting with the orange zest. Out of this world. Toasting fresh raw pistachios produces a flavor that no pre-packaged roasted nuts can match. Keeps well too, but those toasted pistachios will soften up quickly, especially if you actually have any leftovers that you keep in the fridge.

Finally, I skipped the pineapple and coconut (none on hand). Although we've enjoyed coconut in carrot cake in the past, we didn't seem to miss it this time; that may be a permanent change. And while I love fresh pineapple, in his own words, Greg "has never understood putting pineapple in a perfectly good carrot cake." Enjoy!