Jimmy Carter is one of the presidents that comes up when I talk to strangers about this strange Head of State Cakes projects. Everyone bets that the Jimmy Carter cupcake features peanuts or peanut butter. Jimmy Carter means more to me than having been a peanut farmer.
Jimmy Carter is the first president during whose presidency I was alive. Barely. You know, for a matter of months. That, however, doesn’t stop a child from holding a special place in her heart for him.
In college, one of my history professors described Jimmy Carter something like this, “He’s probably the first president to use the presidency as a launchpad for better things.” Like Truman before him, though, he did his best during difficult times. He faced inflation, an energy crisis and a difficult hostage situation. Those Carter years were tough times and he had to maneuver those tough times without the finesse with the time’s media like a Roosevelt or a Kennedy.
Though he was a single term president who had been, before that, the governor of Georgia. Jimmy Carter had broad experiences. He grew up in rural Georgia and left it to join the Navy where he was able to see much of the world. Post-presidency, Carter has worked with Habitat for Humanity international in order to provide housing for people who might not otherwise have had it. President Carter has also done a lot of work smoothing tensions between countries. He has also observed elections in countries that have had a history of corrupt election-related processes. This is why his cupcake is the Globetrotter.
The Cake:
While Jimmy Carter has spent a significant part of his life performing a variety of roles around the world, it seems that his beginnings in Plains, Georgia have had a lasting impact on him. Here he saw the effects of structural inequity and of poverty on the quality of people’s lives. These are some of the things he worked to improve for most of his life. So, his cupcake features ingredients that are plentiful in his home state, pecans and peaches.
The cupcake is flavored with peach jam. It is frosted with pecan-cinnamon cream cheese frosting and garnished with toasted pecans. Inside the cupcake is a brown sugar peach compote. Playing with peaches and pecans made me want to add some bourbon to the mix, however, Carter is no drinker, so I left the bourbon out.
This cupcake tastes like a peach cobbler mated with a pound cake and named cinnamon cream cheese frosting as the progeny’s godfather.
