The Joy and The Sorrow of Carrot Cake

As advertised, I made some carrot cake for our Fathers Day festivities. One bad thing about this is that I actually made TWO carrot cakes. The first one I accidentally shredded the carrots instead of grating them, which I thought would ruin the cake but I didn't realize it until I was putting it into the oven and thinking about how I didn't remember it being so chunky the last time I made it. Then I realized my mistake. So I immediately made another, except since my cake pans were full of the first cake, I made the second batch into a zillion mini cupcakes, which ended up being what we ate for Fathers Day. So this would've all worked out nicely, except that the first cake ended up being just fine--so then we had an entire carrot cake in our fridge, PLUS the leftover cupcakes! Yikes! What's a girl to do? Well, send it to her husband's work, of course. That's the easy part--I'd be glad to be rid of the calories taking up my entire fridge--but the hard part is REMEMBERING to send it with him. So far, I'm three [rather large] pieces into my forgetfulness.

I started today in a more healthful way: What you see is a homemade bagel (THANKS, JILL!) topped with cream cheese that has some fresh snipped onion chives added to it. Talk about yum! Paired with a cup of coffee (with one little ground in it, not a bug, I promise) that made for a good morning. Such a good morning in fact that I had another one a few hours later topped with some homemade cherry jam from Clare! The second was actually pretty incredible. The bagel recipe makes a batch of 10 and I topped five with poppy seeds, five with sea salt. The sea salt, toasted and paired with the cherry jam was so good that I decided that's what we'll be having for dinner tonight as well.

And then Anja and I had carrot cake for lunch.

....with milk.

Uuuuuuuggghh, and now I'm totally feeling the Revenge of the Carrot Cake being played out in my stomach. Bleh. It's DEFINITELY time to remember to send the rest of it in to Martin's office with him.

And while I was baking the bagels yesterday, Greta was creating performance stages for herself with my cake pans!

Last night we had a few big storms come through the area. Not a big deal, the girls usually sleep through storms. Except for this time. THIS time, after I stayed up after Martin went to bed to track the storms on the radar and keep up with the weather blog just in case The Big One came tearing through and was pretty much ready to hit the hay, Greta woke up a little bit. No big deal... nurse her back to sleep... Until a giant clap of thunder scares her back awake so much that she cried without sound for pretty much a full minute!! I'm not sure what time I finally got to bed, but Martin ended up driving her, IN the thunderstorm, and just getting her out of the car drenched all of us and woke her up again, but luckily she went back to sleep and then so did I. Whew. What a night!