Amerikanische Oster Karotten Torte

This is a typical American Easter carrot cake. It has nothing in common with the Swiss carrot cake. It is much heavier and sweeter than the Swiss original, but that also makes it perfect for decorating!

Especially at Easter, you often have visitors and soon don’t know what to serve. A cake like this keeps for quite a long time and is still very fresh on the 2nd or 3rd day. It’s the carrots that keep the cake fresh!

How you decorate it is up to you; I made an Easter nest on top! Everyone loved it! This cake is part of the blog event of Zorras Kochtopf, Cook across America, which is hosted by Gabi from USA kulinarisch.

I wasn’t served this cake on my travels in the USA, nor was I there at Easter, but always in the summer. I was there for the first time in 1984, just after the Olympics, and in New York we saw the parade of returning athletes, a great procession through the main streets of the city. Our journey then took us via Minneapolis to California, San Francisco, where we visited relatives in Napa Valley. From there we went to Oregon, Portland, where another branch of our family had settled. Here is a little of our family history:

After the last famine in Switzerland, around the mid-1800s, a son of my mother-in-law’s ancestors emigrated to America. Months later, his siblings received a letter telling them to join him, as there was work for everyone in America.

You have to remember that in Switzerland the eldest son always inherited the farm or his father’s business, and the other children were left empty-handed. You can’t divide up a farm, because we don’t have large farms. So, the other children, and there were usually more than just 2 children per family, had to see for themselves how they could make ends meet.

So, 1 other brother and 3 sisters traveled to New York, America, to meet the other brother there. The siblings were all already married and had their partners with them. They worked until they had saved enough to travel across America with covered wagons and horses, because Oregon was the “holy” land for the Swiss. Many Swiss really did settle there, because the climate and nature are very similar to Switzerland.

These families were on the road for 9 years, stopping every now and then in a town to work and earn money so that they could travel the next section. They had children, lost some and after 9 years, 1 family less, because they stayed in California, they arrived in Portland, where they built up farms. We visited their descendants!