The last thing I wrote here was about the time I put a quarter of a habanero in my scrambled eggs and still nearly lost the whole morning to it. That was April 2015. In my defense, I have been busy. On the flipside, eleven years is a long time to leave a blog sitting there with a pepper-related cautionary tale as the final word.

Here is where I landed in the meantime. I am not a cook. I am a birthday cake guy.

Somewhere along the way I became the person in my family who shows up with the cake. Not a bakery box. An actual cake, made in my kitchen, carried to the car with the kind of concentration usually reserved for bomb disposal. I have a line I use when I set it down, and I have used it so many times that people say it with me now: it may not be good, but it was made with love.

That is a joke. The cake is good. This one in particular is the best carrot cake I have ever eaten, and I am not the only person who thinks so.

Where it comes from

I spent two decades as an editor at the Los Angeles Times. So it delights me that the single best recipe in my rotation came out of that paper, from readers who wanted it badly enough to write in and ask.

The cake gets passed around online as the J. Paul Getty Museum carrot cake, which is technically true and gives credit to a building. The person who actually made it was Jean Garrett, wife of Stephen Garrett, the founding director of the Getty Villa. When it opened in the 1970s, somebody had to feed people. Scholars, museum directors, the tea room, the whole apparatus of a working museum. J. Paul Getty was extravagant about art and famously tight about everything else, so the catering budget was thin. Jean Garrett had been a professional cook in England, writing and lecturing before the move, and she put together a crew of volunteers and started working out what to serve.

One of the things she worked out was this carrot cake. It got out. The Times ran it. Readers kept asking for it, which is how it ended up in “Dear S.O.S.,” the paper’s long-running recipe request column, and how it ended up on a few thousand index cards in a few thousand kitchens including mine.

Not bad for a recipe somebody worked out because the boss would not loosen the purse strings.

The recipe

Cake

• 1 1/2 cups corn oil
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups shredded carrots
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1/2 cup crushed pineapple

Combine everything in a large bowl and mix until blended. Pour into a greased 9-by-13-inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

That is the card as Jean Garrett wrote it, and it works. It is not how I make it.

How I actually make it: One batch makes about 7 cups of batter. That is exactly a 9-by-13, which is why the card says what it says. But I want layers, so I double it.

Fourteen cups splits two ways. Two 9-by-2-inch rounds at 5 cups each gives you a two-layer cake and about 4 cups left over, which is a dozen cupcakes. Or split all 14 across three rounds for a taller cake with thinner layers. Five cups in a 9-by-2 leaves the batter enough room to climb without coming over the side, which is the whole reason to measure instead of eyeball.

Line the bottom of each pan with a circle of parchment before you grease it. This cake is dense and moist enough to tear on the way out of the pan otherwise, and a torn layer is a bad start to a stacked cake.

Bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes, and start checking at 30. A toothpick from the center should come out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it, not wet batter. Because of the pineapple this cake never tests bone dry the way a plain yellow cake does, so do not chase a perfectly clean toothpick or you will overbake it.

Cool in the pans on a rack for 15 minutes, run a thin knife around the edge, then turn out and peel off the parchment. Let the layers cool completely before you go anywhere near them with frosting. A warm layer plus cream cheese frosting equals soup.

Cream cheese icing

• 1 pound cream cheese
• 2 1/4 cups confectioners sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1/4 cup crushed pineapple (optional)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Mix the cream cheese, sugar and butter until fluffy. Fold in the pineapple and walnuts.

About that oil

Yes, a cup and a half. Yes, that is a lot against 2 cups of flour. You will find people online who cut it to a cup, or three-quarters, and report back that the cake was still fine.

I am sure it was fine. I do not cut it.

The oil is why this cake is still good on day three, still good on day four, and still good in the refrigerator at 1 a.m. when you are standing there with a fork and no plate. Carrot cake lives or dies on whether it dries out, and this one does not. If you want a lighter cake, there are ten thousand lighter cakes. This is not the assignment.

Things I have learned making it

Toast the walnuts. All of them, the ones going in the batter and the ones going on the outside of the cake. Raw walnuts carry a bitterness that hides behind the sugar but never fully leaves. Ten minutes in a 350-degree oven, shaken once, and they turn earthy and warm instead. Highest return on effort in this entire post.

Double the icing. The recipe as written frosts a sheet cake and does it modestly. It does not frost a layer cake with any confidence. Double it.

Keep the pineapple in the icing, but back it up with more sugar. Here is the tradeoff nobody mentions. That frosting is already soft, a full pound of cream cheese and a cup of butter against a fairly modest amount of confectioners sugar. Crushed pineapple is wet, and wet makes it softer. On a 9-by-13 sheet, delicious. On stacked rounds sitting on a table at a July birthday party, it starts to move. If you are stacking, add confectioners sugar past the 2 1/4 cups the card calls for, a half cup at a time, until the icing holds a peak on the spatula. The pineapple stays. The sugar catches up to it.

Make cupcakes with whatever is left. Scaling up never divides evenly into round pans, and that is fine. Whatever batter does not fit goes into a muffin tin. There is no such thing as leftover batter. There are only cupcakes you have not committed to yet.

The point

I have made this cake for birthdays, for a retirement and once for a friend who was having a bad month and did not ask for anything.

Everything around it is chaos. My counter looks like a crime scene. There is shredded carrot in places shredded carrot should not be able to reach. Katy sits on the stool by the window supervising, and Maggie has to be physically removed from the vicinity of the cream cheese. At some point I will discover I own only one clean bowl.

But the cake comes out right. It comes out right because Jean Garrett figured it out in a museum kitchen fifty years ago on a budget that would not cover a nice lunch today, and because I have made it enough times to know exactly where it wants to be pushed.

So yes, it was made with love. I’m done pretending that’s the joke. It’s just true, and it’s also just a damn good cake.