Public Alpha, Edible The carrot cake I shipped to production untested
By ten this morning the cake was cut, plated, photographed, announced to the entire company and already half gone. By eleven I still hadn’t tasted it.
That is a perfectly normal way to release software. It is a deranged way to release a cake.
The good soul of our office – she calls herself the kitchen lady, which undersells her by a wide margin – had posted the announcement in the workspace channel:
Today’s Sweet Treat! 🍰
A huge thank you to @Luit for treating us to this amazing carrot cake! @Josh’s order has been officially fulfilled by Luit. Haha 😄
Everyone, please head over to the Pantry to grab a slice. It’s already cut and ready to be enjoyed, so come and get it while it lasts! 🥕✨
And my reply, which I stand by:
Umm – please note that this is an rather untested public alpha version of the cake. The next version – beta – will likely be slightly different already
I hadn’t cut it. I hadn’t tried it. I had baked it between 11pm and 1am off a recipe that did not exist yet, carried it to the office, put it in a room with a first-come-first-served policy, and gone to my desk.
Feature request
Every cake I bake ends up in that pantry sooner or later. That’s the deal. It comes out of my oven, it goes to the office, it sits in the pantry, and by lunch there’s a plate with crumbs on it and several people being suspiciously nice to me in the hallway. The pumpkin bread went the same route and did well.
Then Josh joined us. New guy, ate his share of the previous batches, liked them, and then filed the one request nobody had filed yet: carrot cake. A favorite of his. He was polite about it. He was also extremely clear. (For the record, Josh never asked anybody to bake anything at 11pm – that part is entirely mine).
So I made a… pumpkin cake. Again.
Look – I ran out of carrots. What was I supposed to do, not bake? We announced that one in the company chat as Josh’s carrot cake, but with pumpkin, which he took with considerably more grace than I would have.
Eleven at night, no recipe
Yesterday I went and bought the ingredients with him, in person, so that no further excuse could be constructed out of an empty vegetable drawer. Then I started at 11pm, because that is when I bake.
The plan was a one-line diff: open the pumpkin recipe, delete pumpkin, insert carrot, ship. And then I didn’t. Somewhere between the screen and the grater I decided to go for the carrot cake I remembered from childhood instead, and here is the complete inventory of what I remembered about it: what it looked like, and what it tasted like. Not one gram of anything. No method. No pan size. Nothing but a color, a texture, and the enormous confidence of a man holding 300 g of carrots at eleven at night.
Grating 300 g of carrots takes longer than you think grating takes. It always does. Every damn time.
By midnight the kitchen smelled like cinnamon and toasted almond, which is a smell that has no business existing in a room where the night air is still warm enough to sweat in. That’s the whole reason I keep baking here, honestly.
A carrot cake with no fat in it
Every carrot cake recipe I have ever read is a delivery mechanism for a cup of sunflower oil. That’s the genre. Oil, sometimes butter, usually both, and then a slab of cream cheese frosting on top thick enough to be load-bearing. And it’s fucking delicious, which is why nobody has ever thought to question it.
Mine has NONE of it. No butter, no oil, not a drop, and I want to be clear that this was not a health decision – it was a decision about what I remembered. The fat comes from three egg yolks and 200 g of finely ground almonds. The moisture comes from the carrots themselves, from 100 g of plain yogurt, and from egg whites beaten to stiff peaks and folded in at the very end by hand, with a spoon, because a mixer would murder them.
The other half of the trick is 1 tsp of baking soda woken up with 1 tsp of lemon juice. Classic.
Out of the oven around 1am. Cooled on a rack while I stood there looking at it. Dusted with powdered sugar rather than iced with lemon glaze, because the lemon glaze it deserved was not going to happen at that hour and I know my limits, roughly, at that time of night.
Shipping straight to production
Josh’s carrot cake, but with carrots. Finally.
This morning it went to the office uncut and untasted. Whatever was wrong with it, I was going to find out at the same moment as everybody else. (Well – a few minutes after everybody else, since first come first served applies to me too).
And then the good soul of the office did something I still haven’t fully recovered from: she took a still photo of the cake, fed it to Veo 3 through Gemini, and attached the result to her announcement: the cake, surrounded by exotic parrots, nibbling at it, tearing slices open, revealing the fluffy carrot-flecked inside in loving slow motion. Vietnamese voiceover. Gemini watermark. Titled Cảm ơn bánh Ca rot của Luit.
I have shipped software for a living for years and no release of mine has ever had an announcement asset this good.
Cảm ơn bánh Ca rot của Luit
The changelog nobody expected
Josh said it was the best carrot cake he has ever had. Out loud, in the dev area, in front of witnesses, which in an office is roughly a notarized statement.
A workmate whose standards I would describe as punishing said it was exactly sweet enough, fluffy, moist, and left it at that – and from him, three adjectives with no complaint attached is a standing ovation.
The man who used to run this whole company, and now carries a title with the words “senior”, “strategic” and “advisor” in it, called me in person (we’ve been friends long enough that I get to write this down). He said thank you. He said he was surprised it worked at all without a rich American-style cream coating. Then he ordered me to make it again. With a wink, but an order. Ahem.
And then all the others – the hallway ones, the elevator ones, the ones who wait until lunch outside to tell you the cake was addictive, refreshing, exceptional, and could there be more of it soon.
I ate my slice expecting to find the flaw. I’m my own harshest critic and I usually get there by the second bite. This time I got as far as two variation ideas – a little more cinnamon, and maybe the lemon icing after all – and nothing that qualified as a bug. It’s moisty in that specific way that has nothing to do with grease – dense and cool and almost wet at the center, sweet without being sugar-loud. It tastes like something I ate before I could read.
The build
Ingredients
- 200 g finely ground almonds
- 200 g wheat flour
- 300 g finely grated carrots
- 220 g cane sugar
- 100 g unsweetened yogurt
- 3 eggs, size M
- 1 tsp baking soda, about ≈5 g
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Method
- Separate the eggs. Beat the yolks with a mixer until light and fluffy, then add the sugar and the vanilla extract gradually and keep beating until the whole thing turns creamy.
- In a second bowl, mix the flour with the baking soda, then stir in the ground almonds.
- In a third bowl, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Set them aside and stop touching them.
- Fold the grated carrots into the yolk mixture, then the flour-soda-almond mixture, then the yogurt, the cinnamon and the lemon juice, all on low speed.
- Fold in the egg whites last, with a spoon, by hand, until the batter is smooth and light and looks like it might float off the counter.
- Pour it into a round pan lined with parchment paper – 24 cm for a taller cake, 26 cm for a flatter one. Bake at 180 °C top and bottom heat for ≈50 minutes.
- Turn it out of the pan and let it cool. Lemon powdered-sugar icing on top, or just dust it with powdered sugar, which is what I did and which nobody complained about.
It keeps in the fridge for a few days if you cover it, or in the freezer if you’re planning further ahead than I ever do. Fresh out of the oven it’s warm and open and slightly reckless. Cold from the fridge it’s denser and, I think, better. Both are correct.
Tonight or tomorrow night I’m building it again, much smaller release: two people, one kitchen, no pantry, no announcement channel, no parrots. Jayden gets the beta. The office gets the next one after that, whenever I find an evening for it, and Josh already knows it’s coming.
Version 1.0.0 went to production untested and nothing caught fire. I don’t recommend this. I’m going to do it again.
Peace out & ngon quá 🥕
