A+ Carrot Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting.

Oh Sweet, Sweet Melissa. You've captured my heart. This darling book has so many interesting recipes in it!! I first saw it on Gigi Cakes site...months ago when I was just starting to get into blogging. It seemed like almost every time I saw something I liked...it came from this book. I took advantage of my Amazon Prime account and ordered it right away with free 2 day ship.

And I've perused it many times...and bookmarked a bunch of goodies. For this just past Memorial Day...I wanted to make carrot cake for a family gathering. I liked Dorie's Bill's Carrot Cake made previously for my Earth Day Cupcake Hero in April, but I wanted to try Sweet Melissa's recipe after seeing Miss Gigi's cutie carrot cake back in early May.

So try it I did. And it was wonderful! Though I think that the really wonderful recipe transforming addition of really-rum-soaked raisins helped it out a little..you could taste the bursts of flavor as you bit into the cake. I soaked the raisins overnight so they were huge and plump the next morning. I also added diced pecans into the batter.



I didn't use the 2nd stick of butter that the cream cheese recipe called for, so the result was not enough frosting to have a 5 layer cake and frost the sides as well so I just did the more au natural cake look. It was just the right amount of frosting taste-wise though...sides as well might have been too much.



This is definitely my new go-to carrot cake recipe...it has a little more of the familiar carrot cake structure than Dorie's which was a little finer and lighter of a cake, barely held together by the nuts and raisins in that recipe. I also decided I didn't like coconut IN the cake, but I really like it as a topper for frosting.



When the cake arrived..it got a lot of oohs-and-aahs but the best compliment was from my Mom when she sliced it and bit in and pronounced it an A+. For anyone for reads my blog religiously, you might know that for Mother's Day I made my Mom a layered lemon cake, which turned out beautifully, and she thought it had too buttery of a frosting, even though she asked for a 'real buttercream'...and she has a major picky sweet tooth. She is always purchasing top-notch expensive desserts (wonder where I get my sweet tooth), so typically homemade for her is not as good as what you can get elsewhere which I don't necessarily agree with but hey...we're different! I still adore her.

So for her to pronounce it A+ and take a HUGE slab home with her....is high praise indeed. This post should have gone up 2 weeks ago so it's a little late, and I didn't get that many photos...it was kind of a hasty creation and decoration process due to time constraints...but it sure was yummy...I've been daydreaming about making it again.

For anyone who does not own the Sweet Melissa Baking Book, I highly recommend it. Between the Dorie book and this one, I have my hands full with 'stuff I want to bake'...I just don't have enough time or hands!