CARROT CAKE REVIEW NO 36 - The Tray Bake Equivalent Of Posh Totty

Folks Coffee Co, Holt, Norfolk

Probably the newest cafe in Holt, let alone North Norfolk, Folks is developing a small scale Norfolk chain of cafes. One in Norwich, Blakeney and Heydon, now joined by this one here. Clean minimalist layout, light coloured tables with rather lovely bent wood pale rattan chairs, olive green table light, warm grey and white crockery. Folks Holt effortlessly nails the brief for a sparsely styled modern cafe. 

It also produces a very fine Oat Latte. The cake range, though often limited, is always well made. So I could confidently order a Carrot Cake, which was really, as ever, the ubiquitous tray bake. But this being Holt, it wasn't considered acceptable to produce a passably fine tray bake, it had to do everything but put brass knobs on it. 

So where shall I start in describing this tray bake? Well, what first attracts your eye is the huge amount of foof, the confected froth of stuff they pile on top of it. Not just a Pecan nut, but also three small dimpled pools of a fruit compote, an extravagant scattering of lavender and wild flower petals, not to mention a handsomely generous thick cream cheese topping. All atop a small cube of dark coloured carrot cake that has heft, moistness, dried fruit, chopped nut, and more than enough grated carrot that it patently shows its strandy origins in the external texture of the cake. My God, this might just be the tray bake that ticks most of the fucking boxes I've ever conceived of, in my admittedly nitpicking pedantic imagination. Bar the one about tray bakes not being truly cakes, which remains true, whatever.

So glory alleluia! the darned thing tastes like a carrot cake ideally should. All the top stuff is not an unnecessary distraction of confetti, but genuinely complements the flavours of the tray bake beneath. A very good carrot cake like texture, not too weighty, not over cooked nor under cooked, not claggy nor doughy, not too mixed spicey or flavourless, not dominated by the taste of banana, not, for Christ's sake, a cake of blandly unidentifiable origin. Not any of these things I interminably criticise more grown up Carrot Cakes of actually being. This is probably the nearest a tray bake will ever come, to fulfilling my stringent recipe requirements for any Carrot Cake, whatever the species.  Yeah, always a shame about the tray bake. But maybe I'll just softly blur the edges a bit, and partially forgive that on this one occasion.
    

    CARROT TRAY BAKE SCORE - 7/8