Perfect excuse for a Looney Tunes tie in! As I was posting this I was informed by Doug that one of the images I lit and composited for the upcoming Looney Tunes shorts was released in the New York Times. Very cool! This is the project keeping me busy and almost late on Daring Bakers posts! So go see these guys in theatres this summer (July 30th to be exact)! The whole team on this is just insane. Such devotion to these characters.  Cartoon Network made there announcement about the new Looney cartoon show with a lackluster response to the style and I’m glad people can at least see this now to see the shorts are going to be nothing like whoever is doing the cartoon thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/movies/20looney.html

There he is

Ok, now back to what I was actually writing.

I never liked cream cheese.   I know, some of you are feeling your blood pressure spike at me saying that, but I just really don’t like it. That tang so many people like just doesn’t suit my palate. You put a bagel in front of me, there better be butter coming next. If there’s only cream cheese, I’ll eat it plain before I smear that on my food.  The hubby, however has been known to take tubs of strawberry cream cheese and dip cold cinnamon raisin bagels in it. Gross. I will from time to time use it VERY sparingly in a buttercream and it can add a great complexity to it, but disliking cream cheese frosting rules out traditional versions of some of my Southern cake biggies: red velvet cake, hummingbird cake (mmm!) and of course, carrot cake.

Sure, I know you don’t need cream cheese frosting for a carrot cake, but normally that’s what people associate with it. Well, I made my first carrot cake anyways recently. Not sure why I’ve never made a carrot cake before (a good hint might be that this, as it stands, is the ONLY dessert I’ve made to not be completely devoured at work before lunchtime. Sneaking veggies in food. I bet that’s it. They can tell. They can smell the vitamins and healthy stuff from a mile away!) I saw this recipe over at Rosa’s Yummy Yums where she got the recipe from over at Baking Bites. First of all, carrot cake isn’t your typical bundt cake. The heavy ingredients and structure of it are more conducive to a regular cake pan than a bundt so this recipe caught my eye.  Anyone who’s done much baking knows if you’re in a hurry and don’t want to trash your entire kitchen making a treat- bundt is totally the way to go. Mix it up, dump it in, bake. Powdered sugar or a simple glaze later and you got dessert.  One bowl. 2 max.

I stuck to Rosa’s adaptation til the raisins. I have a beef with raisins in my baked goods. Instead, I shredded the carrots extra fine and used about a cup extra. The cake was good. The orange glaze was amazing. Just a simple powdered sugar glaze with a few drops of orange extract in it. I was out of oranges, so I added extra extract with a little almond extract to balance it out. Rosa’s was such an attractive shade of pink, I went the same route.  It’s a very moist cake and stays that way for a while. If anyone is looking for a quick carrot cake recipe, this one’s pretty top notch.

The entire recipe (and far prettier pictures) can be found here.