Many years ago I received a compliment at a potluck dinner. 'Your carrot cake is better than my mom's.' I smiled, whispered 'thank you', and tried to avoid eye contact with the mom in question for the rest of the evening.

I should have told everyone that that particular carrot cake was a pretty straightforward copy of a Canadian Living recipe, with a little bit of booze and mixed spice thrown in for colour.

Oh well.

Here, in my continuing series of carrot cakes, I bring you the Canadian variation, moist, dense and fragrant. 

In Switzerland, brown sugar is not readily available. I don't mean rohrzucker, which is dry, and found everywhere. Rather, I mean the moist, sandy variant common in North American cooking.

 Substituting white sugar means that you lose some of the caramelly flavour and moisture of the brown sugar. 

Normally to make up for this I slightly reduce the amount of sugar and add maple syrup, treacle, birnenhonig or any other syrup, then mix together to make a damp mass. 

In the case of the carrot cake, I used about two tablespoons of the pineapple juice from the tinned pineapple to make the sugar damp.

300 g flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ginger

200 g brown sugar

180 g oil

3 eggs

1 shot rum (or spirit of choice)

215 g carrots, grated

275 g pineapple, crushed or minced

Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F / gas mark 4.

Grease and paper a 9 inch / 24 cm springform pan.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and spices.

In a large bowl, whisk together sugar, oil, eggs, and rum. Stir in carrots and pineapple. Gently fold in the dry ingredients. Do not overmix.

Scrape batter into pan and bake for about 40 minutes.

• If tinned, crushed pineapple is unavailable, just mince tinned pineapple rings (I used ten rings for this recipe). Do mince this thoroughly, as larger pieces will hold together during baking.

• Avoid tunnels by not overmixing. Find out more here.

• This is a very wet and dense cake. If your oven is on the cool side, or not properly pre-heated, it will take a bit longer. When testing for doneness, press on the cake and make sure that the top springs back completely before you take it out of the oven.

The normal finish for a carrot cake is, of course, cream cheese icing. However, I like to plate and serve my carrot cake with a delicate drizzle of cream cheese glaze.

To make the glaze, mix together

30 g butter, very soft

200 g cream cheese, very soft

150 g icing sugar

1 shot rum (or spirit of choice)

Then spoon sparingly over the cake.

My mother-in-law's oven. A competent oven.  

The aftermath. My Swiss husband called this 'quite a mess'. And here I thought I did well.