carrot cake

We celebrated a birthday in the house recently and the chosen cake was carrot. I was pleased with this choice because I've been craving carrot cake for months now but the husband doesn't like it. When there's only two of you in the house you have to make sure that both of you are going to enjoy it - otherwise there's an unequal gaining of weight and that's just not fair. Sadly, that isn't an issue anymore.

I adapted Alton Brown's carrot cake recipe and it turned out fabulously. The cake itself is very dense and I really like that it wasn't too sweet. I upped the spices and switched vanilla bean for the extract in the icing recipe - both great decisions.

The recipe makes just enough for one 9 inch round cake and the right amount of icing to cover it. If you want to do a two-layer cake I'd suggest doubling both recipes.

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Lemon-Vanilla Bean & Berry Tarts

No 4th of July BBQ is complete without a tasty dessert, and the combination of lemon French yogurt cake, vanilla bean pastry cream, and fresh berries is hard to beat.

The handy thing about garnishing cute little individual tarts with fresh berries is that they are amazingly beautiful and look like you slaved in the kitchen for hours to complete - which is rarely ever the case. That being said, I'm ever the fan of delicious eats that look impressive and are in actuality so easy a trained chimp could make them.

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Roasted Strawberry Compote with Vanilla Bean

There are few Monday afternoon activities that top walking down the street to my town's farmers market and picking up a basket of freshly picked, California-grown strawberries. I'm not sure what it is about the Central Coast area, but the powers of earth and awesomeness have collided and provided some prime strawberry-growin' turf.

I grew up in a small town in Northwest Washington State on a defunct raspberry farm. The area however, was not only well known for its raspberries, but also the strawberries, blueberries, and hazelnuts the fertile soil allowed to flourish. I remember many a day of going strawberry picking with my mother and sister to make jams, jellies, and whatnot. (Later in life we simply bought them in 5-gallon buckets from a local farm, but I still enjoy the memories of picking them by hand - though I'm sure I drove my mother batty while doing so.)

The strawberries from my childhood memories cannot even begin to compete with the berries they grow here.

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