Dessert in the Land of Plenty

My favorite dessert is carrot cake. I’m not sure exactly when or why this happened, but there it is. I don’t have a particular favorite purveyor or recipe, though my preference is that it contain walnuts. Raisins I could take or leave. I have never actually baked one myself, and don’t have a cake pan. I am, generally speaking, trying to go easy on the carbs.

We all have our indulgences; a price we are willing to pay. It’s easy to imagine that carrot cake’s is relatively low. The vegetal aura, the warm, unthreatening spice—it seems (questions of dessert tend to slip sideways around rational thought, into the realm of baseless intuition) almost monastic where nutrition is concerned. The palanquin of cream cheese frosting, granted, but that’s mostly for pageantry’s sake. Nowhere near the insouciant bulk of a cheesecake or the oozy debauch of a pecan pie. The carrot, associated most closely in my mind with the image of a crudité edging toward room temperature on a lonely table at a chaperoned dance, and particularly the shredded carrot, postiche of shitty