The way family and friends clamor for Vicki Schmitt’s carrot cakes, you’d think she runs a craveworthy catering business. The mother of two and grandmother of four smiles: “I just enjoy baking.”
Schmitt had worked for one month at the organization now known as the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership when in 2012 she was tasked with ordering food for a quarterly advisory board meeting and decided to make a cake. She pulled out a recipe found in Southern Living magazine about a decade prior, and the result was a hit.
It snowballed from there. At E-REP, “We’d send out a new hire form that asked them how they’d like to celebrate their birthdays,” Schmitt says. “Half of them, after they tasted this cake, said this cake is what they wanted.” Retiring in January 2024 didn’t stall the requests.
Schmitt’s cake swats away apprehension about that headlining ingredient. “People think, ‘I don’t like carrots, I won’t try it.’ Once they try it, it blends together. You don’t notice one thing more than another,” she says. “It tastes so much different than what it sounds like, like sweet potato pie.”
Calling the original recipe a success, Schmitt says she’s only tweaked it — for example, swapping walnuts for pecans. There is one key difference: “It has a buttermilk glaze on it. That makes it super moist. I include some pineapple and coconut, and that helps keep moisture in. But the buttermilk glaze helps it stay moist forever.”
Not that she’s had the chance to try that theory: “I haven’t tested it because there are no leftovers!” she laughs.
She makes carrot cake sparingly — probably five or six times a year — because “it is kind of a labor of love. You don’t come home and decide, ‘I’ll make this and take it to work.’ It takes hours. It’s not difficult; there are lots of steps, between grating carrots, chopping nuts, mixing batter, baking it, mixing the glaze, letting it sit, then doing the cream cheese icing. You’re talking several hours. Usually, I try to break it up into two days.”
Baking carrot cake is only a small slice of Schmitt’s culinary passion.
“I enjoy baking, I enjoy cooking. I like making pot roast, meat loaf, a chicken cheese dish, mac and cheese. I experiment a lot,” she says, although carrot cake isn’t regularly in her lineup. “It’s meant to be for something special.”
