Cake Friday

Can you guess what type of cake it is? Hopefully, it is fairly obvious that it is carrot cake.

I have never been a fan of carrot cake, which is probably why I have never made one, gluten-free or otherwise, before today.  In fact, today I came pretty close to never making a finished carrot cake at all. Not one batch of cake, but TWO, completely flopped. I am not sure what went wrong, since the recipe I first used had good reviews. Sometimes cakes just don't work out though. I wish I had taken a picture of the sad mess just so you could feel my pain. They puffed up, overflowed into a big mess, burnt on the bottom of the oven (which had to be cleaned up after each attempt), and then slumped into a nasty looking bit of cake-sludge in the pans. 

For the third try, I tried a slightly different recipe which I found here. It sunk slightly, so I may want to fudge around with the amounts of baking soda and baking powder, or perhaps I just overbeat it. Taste-wise, I thought it was marvelous. The cream cheese frosting was the perfect complement. Since we eat casein-free here, it was tofutti cream cheese, which is actually pretty dandy stuff.

Although this was my first time baking carrot cake, it was not the first time I have made fondant carrots. Just for fun, I thought I would throw in some pictures of a cake I made for Thanksgiving a few years back.

It's a turkey cake, complete with fondant carrots, potatoes, greenery, and white leg poof things (I have no idea what they are called). Since I am nerd, the breast portion of the cake was white chocolate, and the dark meat portions were pumpkin. I suppose this isn't really the correct season to post this, but working on today's cake just reminded me what fun it was.