Carrot for Carrie

The best excuse to make a cake is for a coworker's birthday. I get cake practice, everyone at work gets cake, and the birthday person gets to take home whatever cake is left.

Naked cake

Carrie requested a carrot cake with traditional carrot decorations. I was excited because carrot cake meant I got to use my new shredder attachment! I love my Kitchenaid so dearly, and every new attachment just makes it better.   For the filling, I used some leftover coconut frosting that had been waiting for a purpose since my birthday.        

Conspicuous lack of crumbs

I decided to forgo a crumb coat and just get the frosting on there. Lo and behold, it worked!   I put a fairly thin layer of frosting on, and I realize now that I could have gotten away with a pretty thick helping. I'm bad a spatial reasoning, which makes me bad at portioning. Oh well, no crumbs showing through!                                                                                                          

I'm pleased with the colors - vibrant but not terrifying. Carrie said that she really liked orange and green, which fit nicely with the carrot theme. I thought about practicing a few carrots to try to get them uniform, but I decided that real carrots are not uniform cones so I went crazy with carrot borders. 

My lettering is a little crooked. Lucky for me I had lots of frosting left (see above) so I'm going to get some lettering practice in this weekend.

I used the grass tip (or as I like to call it, the Muppet fur tip) for the carrot stems. It's not as clean looking as the leaf tip would have been, but I was going for authenticity! I was worried about the spacing on the carrots at first, thinking they were too far apart, but I think they would look weird if they were overlapping at all. 

Finished cake

This was a fast one - I was done in under an hour, including making the frosting. I was done so early, I even did some of the dishes instead of leaving them for tomorrow. I can't wait to bring this one in.