Queen Anne's Lace in the Kitchen

One of my favorite carrot treats is carrot cake. I found a recipe specifically using Wild Carrots on Cooks.com. Queen Anne's Cake seemed like a simple cake recipe that only took about 45 minutes including prep time. I was fortunate enough to have my dear friend and fellow cooking enthusiast, Lauren, joined me in the wild food making this week.

To start off we harvested the plant: As my partner in cooking-crime and I discovered the roots of Queen Anne’s Lace do not give very easily. I highly recommend using a harvesting devise (a shovel would due) and pulling them anytime other than the time we chose- on the roadside at midday in July. Despite some difficulty harvesting the plants we were able to collect all that we needed. Queen Anne’s Lace is incredibly abundant on the sides of roads; we hardly put a dent in the small patch we found.

Once back to the kitchen, I began prepping the carrots as Lauren measured and mixed the other ingredients. The recipe says to grate the carrots; unfortunately we didn’t have a grater so I tried having the same affect as one using a knife. I didn’t realize that Wild Carrots would be as tough as they are. If I were to use them again I would first boil or sauté the Wild Carrots with butter to soften them.

We cut the recipe in half, because we didn’t want two whole cakes. In addition, we tweaked the recipe slightly by adding brown sugar and making a crumble topping out of brown sugar and walnuts instead of using icing. Our final product, therefore, would be better titled: Carrot and Brown Sugar Crumble Bars.

Despite how potently Wild Carrots smell of carrot, they don’t carry the same amount of flavor to the taste as our Domestic Carrots. I definitely think in the future I would use more carrots (in addition to softening them). Overall I believe these changes would make the texture and flavor more enjoyable. Our final product, however, was very yummy, even if it didn’t hold as much carrot flavor as I had hoped.