When life gives 'Zoë Bakes Cakes' author Zoë François veggie scraps, she makes this stunning cake decoration: spiced, candied carrot peel.
When life gives 'Zoë Bakes Cakes' author Zoë François veggie scraps, she makes this stunning cake decoration: spiced, candied carrot peel.
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters.
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Zoë starts listing them at 1:03) before starting the episode.
Zoë François: You know, when when you're in restaurants, you think about, "How can I use absolutely every single part of a piece of fruit or a vegetable?" And so this is just a really nice way to use the peels, which would otherwise just go into the compost.
Zoë: Hi, this is Play Me a Recipe. I'm Zoë François coming to you from my kitchen in Minneapolis. Today we're gonna make candied carrot peel, which is linked in the show notes and on Food52.com. But we'll be gathering the ingredients, slicing, dicing, baking, everything alongside each other, so feel free to pause or jump back using the podcast chapters if you feel like you need a little more time to make the candied carrot peels.
Zoë: We need very little in the way of ingredients. We need organic carrots. Then we need simple syrup, which is just sugar water. I use a tiny bit of corn syrup just to keep it from crystallizing. And then whole spices. Go with something bold like, um, cardamom or star anise, cinnamon, clove. All of those things, whatever floats your boat. And that's it for ingredients.
Zoë: Then for equipment, we need a peeler. Use a sharp one. Then you need a pot to cook your simple syrup, a baking sheet and then a silicone mat to dry out the candy carrot peels on, and that's it. Super simple.
Zoë: So the first thing I want to do is make simple syrup. It's all in the name. It's super easy. It's just two ingredients, really. Um, granulated sugar--so a cup of granulated sugar goes into a pot, and then we have our water, equal parts water and sugar. So a cup of sugar, a cup of water. Alright, and then I add just the tiniest bit of corn syrup to the mix. And this just prevents the sugar from crystallizing as it's cooking. A little pinch of salt to balance the sweet flavor, and also to help keep the color on your carrots while they're baking. The last thing I want to do is add some kind of a spice. I'm using star anise because it has a really nice, bold flavor. And, you know, the carrots are just going to pick up a little bit of that flavor as you drag them through this simple syrup. So you want whatever spice you're using to be bold. Uh, so now we just cook this for about five minutes over medium high heat. It takes about five minutes for all of the sugar crystals to dissolve and for us to have a perfectly smooth simple syrup. So five minutes, we'll come back, we'll prepare our carrots and we'll move on with our recipe.
Zoë: Okay, and we're back. Um, this is Play Me A Recipe. I'm Zoë François, and today we're making candied carrot peels, and we are just at the point where our simple syrup is done cooking. So it came to a rolling boil. All of the sugar crystals have dissolved. It's nice and smooth. And now we need to pour this into a bowl just to cool it down quicker. Um, you can just leave it in the pot, but then it takes longer, and I don't want to dip my fingers into boiling hot simple syrup, so into a bowl it goes.
Zoë: And while that is cooling, we will prepare our carrots. And I just have a bag of organic carrots. If you're making this as a garnish to go onto a cake, um, which is what I first came up with this recipe to do, an eight inch cake takes about two pounds of carrots, peeled, to cover it really beautifully, so that you have these tall, beautiful, spiky spires on the outside of your cake. It just takes a carrot cake, which is sort of a humble, like, hippie cake into something with a ton of drama. So just take your carrot, and we're just going to peel them. Super simple. Um, you do want to wash the carrots first, just in case, especially since you're using organic ones, in case they have any dirt on them. Since we will be eating the peel, you want them to be clean. And then dry those off.
And you want to make sure that your carrot peeler is nice and sharp so that you get long, tall pieces of the carrot peel, that it doesn't sort of break halfway through. If your carrot peeler isn't sharp enough, it may just sort of tear at the carrot and not get a nice strip. So then we just peel them. You want to press kind of hard as you're peeling just so that you get a nice, thick piece of peel. If it's too thin, um, they become really brittle and kind of delicate, so it's hard to get them up off of the baking sheet. Once they're dipped in the sugar and baked, uh, and become candy, they can stick to the silicon mat and then crack if they're not thick enough. So while you're peeling, just press pretty hard. I like the texture that you get from having the outside of the peel showing. You can actually just get strips of carrot by going all the way in, like taking the outside peel off and then just continuing to slice away at the carrot. But I kind of like the way it looks to have the outside, that, you know, sort of nubbly texture on the outside. So whichever way you like it better. If you like it perfectly smooth then take the peel off and get the inside of the carrot--it will be smoother and more uniform.
So, like I said, about two pounds of carrots will cover an eight inch cake. When I was doing this, um, in restaurants, I also would slice apples on a mandolin or pears or--or even lemons, any kind of citrus, and then drag that through simple syrup and bake them in exactly the same way I'm doing this. They just make such a beautiful sort of dramatic garnish. And they're perfectly edible. This way we are not wasting any part of this carrot. We're using the entire thing. And you know, when when you're in restaurants, you really think about these things. You think about, "How can I use absolutely every single part of a piece of fruit or a vegetable?" Um, and so this is just a really nice way to use the peels, which would otherwise just go into the compost.
Zoë: So once you have your carrot peels, um, all set, you're just gonna drag it through the simple syrup that you made. Hopefully it's cooled off a bit so I don't burn myself. And I'm just going to drag it through the simple syrup and then just sort of squeegee off the excess with my fingers and then lay it down onto my silicone mat and just continue that. And it smells so great with the star anise in there. I love that smell.
Once you have all of your carrot peels dragged through your simple syrup, you're ready to bake. Lay them all out onto your silicone mat, and then we are ready to get them into the oven. You want to go into a really low oven because you don't want these to get dried out too fast. You want it to happen rather slowly so that they get evenly dried out. They don't take on any color because you want that vibrant orange carrot color to stay there. If your oven was too high, um, they might brown in the oven and you definitely don't want that, so low and slow. Put them into the oven about two hours to really dry them out. And then we'll come back and take a look at our candy.
Zoë: And we're back. This is Play Me A Recipe. I'm Zoë François. And today we're making candied carrot peels, and I've just taken the carrot peels out of the oven and they're dried and gorgeous. And now we need to get them off of the Silpat that is on the baking pan. And they sort of glue themselves to the Silpat because of the sugar. So I use a small offset spatula, just so that I can slide it under the carrot peel without cracking it. Because at this point, once they cool off, they're gonna be pretty brittle. We want them to be hard so that they'll stand up straight. So here I go. And so now I can just lift it off of the Silpat, and it's standing up perfectly straight. So it's nice and dried out and crispy and candied and beautiful.
You want to do this, uh, in a dry environment. Like, if it's super humid out, they're going to come out of the oven and be nice and crispy. But then, because of the humidity, they'll soften up again. So this is one of those garnishes that's best done when it's kind of dry. You also want to put the candied peels on your cake or your dessert or whatever you're garnishing at the last minute. So in other words, you don't want to put it on the cake and then put it in the refrigerator because the refrigerator has lots of moisture in it.
So now that I have my candied carrot, I can place it right on my cake. I have a carrot cake right here, covered in cream cheese icing, and I just put it right on there. The cream cheese icing is like glue, so I just press it on there and continue on until it's covered. So I have them up, and I just press them on, and you can space them out as far as you want. I guess it kind of depends on how many you've made, but I think it looks really nice if you get them close together. It almost creates, like, this beautiful orange fencing around your cake. Okay, press that on. And it's absolutely stunning.
Zoë: So thank you for following along. And this is Zoë François making candied carrot peels from my book, Zoë Bakes Cakes, and I hope you enjoy. So how did it go? How did your carrot peel candy turn out? Is it nice and crisp? Is it standing straight up like a spire? Um, I want to hear all about it. Please tell me how it went and leave a review. And thank you so much for joining me today on Play Me A Recipe.