24 Karat Luv

I made my first ever carrot cake this week..Score!! Even I impressed myself with this cake. It was absolutely delicious!! Moist with a soft dense crumb, just the right amount of chopped pecans. The perfect amount of spices..and the frosting..Ooohmygoodness!! I LOVE cream cheese anyway..like do you want Paula Deen on the FoodNetwork?? You know how she LOVES butter..well that's how I feel about cream cheese. Only unlike Mrs. Paula with her butter, I don't put cream cheese in EVERYTHING..lol Last week I tried out a new chocolate cake recipe, on what I thought was to be my never ending search for MY perfect chocolate cake, well I think I found it. On recommendation from a couple of the members over at CakeCentral I tried the chocolate cake recipe on the back of the hershey's dutch processed cocoa container. It's fabulous!! Exactly the cake I was looking for. Then this week I try the carrot cake recipe from the book "Birthday Cakes: Recipes & Memories from Celebrated Bakers" by Kathryn Kleinman. The recipe was from Maida Heatter. As usual, I'm pretty random with my posting so I don't have the recipe handy in front of me, but if you want it leave me a comment with your email address & I will send it to you or I will try to remember & post it later...promise..lol As I always do when baking a cake, I took some of the batter & made a few cupcakes, they turned out to be absolutely adorable..but after all they are cupcakes, how could they be anything other than adorable? lol And I just couldn't do a cake without some form of decoration, so being that it's a CARROT cake I figured some cute little carrot toppers were in order..so I whipped up about 25 fondant carrots. It was a bit tedious, but well worth it as it gave me some practice with fondant, which I haven't had recently. Not to mention I think the little carrots look adorable!