well, I tried

Tomorrow marks the occasion of my mother's 60th birthday (I'm pretty sure she won't be upset about me calling her out like that).  Her favorite kind of cake is carrot cake, and I thought I'd try my hand at making it.  Her best friend (my godmother) makes a DELICIOUS carrot cake, and I got the recipe from her daughter.  I figured, I can read and generally follow directions, I should be able to handle this!

Well.


Yea.

The first part of the process was to prepare the 'carrot' part of the carrot cake.  Turns out this is not a task for the faint of heart.  My hands will never be the same:

My biggest achievement for the day.

Of course, when my mom got home and was asking me about it she said "did you use the food processor?"  Well, of course not.  The recipe said GRATED, so I grated it!  With an antique vegetable peeler.  Is a food processor an option here?  If it is, please feel free to lie to me to make me feel like I didn't waste 45 minutes of my day grating 2 cups of carrots.

Once I got the carrot shavings taken care of, it came time to mix the ingredients.  That went reasonably well until it started to get thick and I ended up with carrot cake batter all over the kitchen.  Oops.  Anyway, into the oven it went for an hour.  At 45 minutes it was looking beautiful and perfect, and at one hour it looked like this:

I choose to blame the birthday girl for this, she opened the oven door while it was baking. :)

Yep, it sank in the middle.  This made me very sad.  The issue is that I haven't quite learned my parents' oven yet, so I'm still a little off on the times.  I should have taken it out of the oven at about 50 minutes or so.  Foiled again!

I consoled myself with making the cream cheese frosting.  It's hard to feel bad when you're making the most delicious kind of frosting there is.  Mostly because you get to taste test while you're stirring:

 Cream cheese + powdered sugar, butter & vanilla = heavenly

I managed to fudge the final product a little bit by covering the hole with frosting and pecans, so here's the end product:

I forgot to mix the pecans INTO the frosting, so instead I used them to TOP the frosting.

It tasted ok, but the edges were pretty crispy.  Alas.  My hands were also orange for the greater part of my day.
 

The moral of the story is: I tip my cap to you, carrot cake makers of the world!  I'm not sure I'd do it again.  At least, not until I find an easier way to grate carrots.