Last October, I organized Pumpkin Pie Fest, a celebration of that classic Thanksgiving dessert. (In fact, we held the event on the day after Canadian Thanksgiving, a holiday which in this country is called “Columbus Day“, on which we try to pretend we’re not celebrating one of the largest genocides in recorded history.) I baked eight pies, and was able to organize enough other volunteers to double that total. My original purpose in holding the event was to give myself an excuse to try a whole bunch of pumpkin pie recipes and get some sort of objective evaluation as to which one was best — and, not coincidentally, get a bunch of other people to eat most of the pie so I wasn’t stuck with a freezer full of super-high-calorie orange custard.

Earlier this week I was thinking about doing the same for carrot cake. I had three or four recipes that I wanted to try, and I figured <blink>FREE CAKE</blink> would be enough to convince people that it was worth doing. It didn’t seem to work; I received only one response indicating the remotest interest in doing something of the sort, despite asking a number of people who are far better bakers than I am. Of course, carrot cake has its detractors, but for every person who says “sure, I like carrot cake, just don’t make me eat cream-cheese frosting”, there’s another person who views carrot cake as little more than a means to pretend that cream-cheese frosting isn’t quite as unhealthy as it actually is.

Nonetheless, I came up with a list of nine different recipes for things that are vaguely carrot-cake-ish (not counting the Moosewood one that uses pre-cooked carrot) from my personal cookbook collection, and I wanted to take note of them all here before I lose the piece of paper I was using to take notes. There are two major categories: those with raisins, and those with pineapple and shredded or flaked coconut.