Carrot Cake

We seem to have established a tradition around our house where carrot cake is the dessert of choice for Easter dinner. If I recall correctly, this started two or three years ago. I'm a sucker for themes, so when asked to bring dessert to a family gathering at Easter I figured I'd go with carrot cake. (Because Easter is about bunnies, and bunnies eat carrots. Seriously - that's a theme.)

On the weekend my older son was invited to a birthday party leaving my younger son a bit put out. I suggested we bake a cake together while his brother was out and he immediately perked up. Who knew? I pulled out a Williams Sonoma Kids Baking Cookbook I received for Mother's Day a few years back and we settled on carrot cake.

A few words about the WSKBC. I've made a few things out of this book and have always been happy with the results. In particular there is a S'mores cake-thing that's fudge, marshmallow graham cracker goodness.

We had fun baking our cake. The recipe was simple enough that my son actually did participate. He even tasted our efforts during the dry ingredient phase, which was too cute, as it must have tasted horrible but he smiled gamely and pronounced it 'great'. He was especially excited by the cream cheese icing, since it involved using the electric mixer. He managed to jack it up to top speed in a bowl of butter and cream cheese while I was across the kitchen getting icing sugar. He scared himself a little but was nevertheless pleased with the results of that little experiment....

We ate our cake for dessert on Sunday and it was good. We choose not to include the 'yucky' optional walnuts and golden raisins, which I think would have been a nice touch. All things considered it wouldn't have mattered if the cake tasted poorly - we had a great time making it together. It was one of those afternoons that get you through a long week.