A Guide to the Best Carrot Cake in Buenos Aires
Some of you are passionate about Renaissance art or farmers’ markets or NCAA basketball. Maybe running does it for you, or breadmaking, or collecting keychains. Me? I unabashedly love carrot cake.
I can make my own, and it’s pretty good, even though my oven here has only three settings (high, medium, and low) and I failed to bring back a functional oven thermometer from my trip to the States over Christmas, so I still end up having to stab my cake six or eight times with a fork to test its doneness and then cover its scars with an extra-thick application of cream cheese frosting.
But I sometimes want to enjoy its flavor without having to make an entire cake, so one of my first orders of business upon taking up residence in Buenos Aires was finding my local carrot cake spot. I approached it with the very best of me: positivity, discerning taste buds, and a spreadsheet.
I love carrot cake too much to ever eat so much of it such that I couldn’t eat it again. I’ve made that mistake before. (One rainy summer day in northern Michigan with my cousin Stephanie, when I was about nine, we were playing with Barbies on the scratchy oat-colored carpeting of her grandmother’s condo. We’d managed to secure an entire bag of miniature Reeses from her grandmother’s freezer. We unwrapped them all, lined them up, and pretended that they were cakes our Barbies were eating (we’d use use their fused-plastic little hands to slice through the layers of chocolate and peanut butter, have our Barbies nibble on them, then eat them ourselves), and finished the entire bag in about twenty minutes. I couldn’t eat Reeses for the eight years to follow, which I consider one of the great tragedies of my life.)
So it’s taken me four months of residence in Buenos Aires to slowly sample a representative handful of the finest carrot cakes CABA has to offer. But I’ve done it, and now I’m going to share my initial findings with you (updates to come, of course, as I try more). From best to worst, my ranking of carrot cake in Buenos Aires (with an admitted over-reliance on the carrot cake of Palermo—I will seek to rectify this going forward):
Full Carrot Cake Ranking:
1. NORMA Brooklyn Cafe
Neighborhood: Colegiales | Taste: 10.0 | Texture: 9.0 | Presentation: 7.0 | Final Score: 9
An amazing specimen of carrot cake. Taste is throughly good, from the first bite to the last. The cake is rich and moist, not too heavy nor too light. The frosting is not at all overpowering but is the right balance for the cake. Near the middle of the cake, it’s almost a little too moist, so it lost a bit on texture, but otherwise flawless. The best CABA has to offer. A tucked-away gem.
2. Bar del Pasaje
Neighborhood: Palermo | Taste: 9.0 | Texture: 8.5 | Presentation: 8.5 | Final Score: 8.7
The best option for when you want a more budín-like carrot cake (something more resembling a slice of cake loaf versus a three-layer full-on cake). Incredible taste—citrusy and sweet (made with oranges along with carrots) but not too sweet at all. Good texture—studded with nuts and almost too many golden raisins (leading to a few overly wet bites). No real frosting, instead just a light icing sprinkled with poppy seeds. I initially was disappointed by the lack of thick, cream-cheesy frosting, but upon tasting the cake, I realized I didn’t really miss it. Tastes wholesome, homemade, delicious.
3. Malvón
Neighborhood: Villa Crespo | Taste: 8.5 | Texture: 8.0 | Presentation: 7.5 | Final Score: 8.1
The carrot cake here is great—full of carrots, raisins, and walnuts; it has a great crumb and a great texture. Its construction is a little slap-dash (the bottom two layers are way thinner than the top one), but it still tastes good, and they’ve gone unconventional with their frosting choices: a lemon glaze on top and a lemon-y cream cheese frosting in the middle. The combination gives the cake a kind of extra-citrusy tang that is surprisingly good and certainly unique, though not my recommendation for the carrot cake traditionalist.
4. Padre Coffee Roasters & Beer
Neighborhood: Palermo | Taste: 8.0 | Texture: 7.0 | Presentation: 6.5 | Final Score: 7.3
Padre’s is a place that does too much (are you a cafe? a brewery? a lunch spot? a breakfast spot?) but does manage to do most things fairly reasonably. Their carrot cake is a solid cake, but it’s more of a spice cake than a traditional carrot; there is a bit of shredded carrot in there, but not much. The frosting a little light but good, not too sugary and not too cream cheese-y but a good mix of both flavors. The the dusting of nuts on top makes for a good texture. En fin, a great cake (that goes very well with a nice latte) but not the carrotiest of carrot cakes.
5. La Panera Rosa
Neighborhood: Palermo, Recoleta, Las Cañitas | Taste: 6.5 | Texture: 7.0 | Presentation: 8.5 | Final Score: 7.0
This cheta little chain of cafes offers not a great cake nor a terrible cake; their carrot cake is decidedly fine. Though its components have whispers of greatness—the cake itself is pretty delicious, chock-full of nuts and carrots and hitting the right spice levels; its presentation is beautiful, cut neatly and with a little piped carrot on each slice, just like a NY deli—it ends up falling a little short of expectations with a very sweet, very thick frosting that overpowered the cake.
6. RUDA Cafe
Neighborhood: Colgiales | Taste: 5.5 | Texture: 5.0 | Presentation: 8.0 | Final Score: 5.8
This cake was a beautifully-wrapped gift whose contents disappointed: three even layers, a dusting of nuts on top, but oversweet and almost gummy in its texture (probably not helped by it being served chilled).
7. MÖOI
Neighborhood: Belgrano, Palermo, Recoleta | Taste: 5.0 | Texture: 5.0 | Presentation: 4.0 | Final Score: 4.8
MÖOI’s name is pretentiousness incarnate—it’s pronounced like muy, or “a lot”—and their carrot cake is too much. Too cold, too dry, too many full-sized nuts, too much overpowering cinnamon flavor. My friend Cam, who split it with me, described it perfectly: “It has one thing going for it—it’s carrot cake.” If you find yourself there and in the mood to overspend on mediocrity, go for it. Otherwise, steer clear.
8. wellbar
Neighborhood: Palermo | Taste: 4.0 | Texture: 4.0 | Presentation: 6.0 | Final Score: 4.4
I loved that wellbar’s cake was double-layered and that I got it for free because I found a piece of plastic in my food. I loved nothing else about it. It’s a vegan carrot cake that really makes you grateful for all the animal products that make things actually taste good. (Butter, butter, and cream cheese, namely.) It was wet and a bit gloppy, relatively unappetizing all-in-all, and the dried-out frosting really detracted further from the experience. A shame, because the rest of wellbar’s food is really, really tasty (when it comes without plastic).
9. Origen Cowork
Neighborhood: Palermo | Taste: 2.5 | Texture: 3.0 | Presentation: 3.0 | Final Score: 2.8
Origen is a buzzing little place if you’re a freelancer looking for a comfortable chair and a terrible little place if you’re looking for carrot cake. I saw it on the menu, got excited, and immediately ordered it, but instead of the loaf cake or slice I was expecting, out came a little muffin, with frosting, low on the carrots and heavy on the nuts, deeply dry and in dire need of a nice coat of frosting. I would eat it if I was without any other food for a period of more than two days and/or if you paid me upwards of $5. To pay for the privilege? No, thanks.