Why Can't Carrot Cake Be This Good?

Tra-la-la, it's The Fall Cookbook Cake Parade: a new cake from a new cookbook every single day. Are your costumes cake pans ready?

Today: a cake with roots, from Lucky Peach Presents Power Vegetables!

Parsnip Cake with Blood Orange Buttercream

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In Power Vegetables, author and cofounder of Lucky Peach Peter Meehan says:

I do not know if my considerable fondness for this cake stems from the quantity of parsnips hidden within it or because those parsnips have been subsumed into a greater whole, a toothsome cake with an appealing but hard-to-pinpoint flavor. Regardless, it’s a winner.

But we adore it for yet another reason: the icing. It's a color you'd think only possible via artificial food coloring—but really it's blood orange, adorably pink and pungently citrusy when swirled into a sugary buttercream. The cake beneath it? It's hardly vegetal—more like a tame spice cake than a carrot cake.

So yes, win win.

For more recipes where this one came from, check out Lucky Peach Presents: Power Vegetables!