So I was telling my friend, Jean, that I don’t like vegetables in cake; least of all, carrots.  She says, “I LOVE carrot cake.  LOOOOOOOOVE carrot cake…with cream cheese frosting….YUM!”

Fine.  I’ll make carrot cake.  On Saturday.

Found a recipe for “the BEST carrot cake”  which, to me, is like the BEST coffee or the BEST bacon-wrapped anything.

 

I grated up two enormous carrots into a bowl before I started anything else.

I followed the very simple instructions of mixing all the dry stuff together and then all the wet and sugary stuff together, then gently mixed everything together and dumped it into a 9 x 13 pan.  The directions suggest two 9″ rounds, but I wanted something that was going to be easier to transport to a restaurant, so I went with the rectangle.

I had to bake it quite a bit longer for it to get cooked in the middle (a problem I’ve been having a lot lately, just having stuff be raw in the middle…I wonder if the oven isn’t getting hot enough?  I’ll have to get one of those oven thermometers to see.)

I pulled it out of the oven when the toothpick came out clean and let it cool for a long time.  Since I was leaving it in the pan, it needed extra time to fully cool before putting the frosting on.

Cream cheese frosting really is the easiest thing to make.  One 8-oz brick of cream cheese, one stick of softened butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla.  That’s it.  Put cheese in the upright mixer with the paddle thing and run it for a minute.  Then put in the stick of butter and let it run for a bit.  Then put the sugar in (slowly or you’ll have a sugary mushroom cloud), and then a splash of vanilla.  Bam.  That’s it!

I put the frosting into a piping bag with the intention of having cute little peaks all over, but there wasn’t enough frosting to go on that thick, so I got out a scraper and smoothed it out.

I’ll have to let you know how people think it tastes.  I know what I think…

Edit:  met up with my favorite weirdos and the decision was unanimous…10/10!  (Except for Sparky, who wrote down 11.)

Edit again:  The middle kid tried it and declared it, “OK.”  Not a carrot cake fan.