Carrot Cake

A few years back I bought The Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook. When I was looking through it at the store I found a recipe for a 3-layer Carrot Cake that looked divine. Basically, no raisins, and it had coconut, pineapple, & pecans with a buttermilk glaze & cream cheese frosting. Your mouth is watering already, I know. This has become a favorite dessert of ours, however, we generally only make it when company comes or when we have a party since it is so rich that we shouldn't eat the whole thing (even though we could & have). This is Brandon's favorite treat after Banana Cream Pie and he wants it all the time so I thought I could make it for Valentine's. Well Friday turned out to be a bad pregnancy day so no cake. So I decided to make it for today and invite company over to share.

The downside for the last two years was that before Karissa was diagnosed with Celiacs it was also one of her favorite desserts and I have kept saying (for the past 2 years) I am going to make a GF version. However, she doesn't need a 9" 3-layer cake and, frankly, I wasn't going to try it out and find out it didn't work and have to throw out a cake that size. Added to this, Brandon's mom gave us the beautiful small cake stand the cake is pictured with that I have tried to figure out how to use outside of just putting a cupcake in it. So for 2 years off and on I have been looking for small cake pans that I could then adapt the recipe and make a smaller version but I never really found what I wanted. Then a few weeks ago my sister suggested Ramekins and I thought that was brilliant, however, I haven't bought them yet and I wanted to make the cake now so I baked the cake in an 11"x7" pan and then cut the "layers" out using one of those disposable baby bowls as a guide. The cake turned out delicious and moist, and honestly, I couldn't tell the difference between the two. I am thinking I am going to use the leftover pieces and chop them up and add cheesecake pudding to them to make a trifle. If you are interested in seeing the actual process you can check out the recipe on my cooking blog Creating from Scratch.