The Good, The Bad, & The FABULOUS: Carrot Cakes Woes & Bays Mountain Fun

I love Saturday! I especially love Saturday when I do not have to do any home improvement projects and those have been few and far between recently. This Saturday was one of our 1st Home Improvement free Saturday’s in months and we really enjoyed it!

Carrot Cake Woes

In order to get things started off right I decided to do a little Saturday baking. So I decided to make my 2nd attempt at a simple Carrot Cake recipe my grandmother found in Guidepost. Here is the recipe if you are interested. I had made this Carrot Cake one time before and it is FABULOUS! It does not have raisins or coconut, two of my least favorite things. I also found that you could buy the pre-sliced and peeled carrots which really speeds up the process! I made the “stack cake” version of this cake the 1st time I made it and everything went beautifully! The cake dumped out of the little round pans perfectly. Given my past experience with “stack cakes” this was truly a magical moment for me. This time I was not so lucky. Unfortunately, neither of the pans of cake got quite done enough in the center. I am going to blame this on my oven, given its age and the fact that I want a new one. The 1st pan dumped out perfectly and began to put the homemade (yummy) cream cheese icing on it. Then came the 2nd pan, I dumped it out and it broke into about 10 pieces! I actually took the whole thing pretty well and went ahead and iced it just as it was. Then we renamed the whole thing Carrot Pile and you can see why below:

Though it may not look so pretty it taste delicious! Despite all my woes I would highly recommend this recipe. It is truly FABULOUS!

Bays Mountain Photography

Now for the rest of Saturday we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and spend a little time at Bays Mountain. Nick and I are both trying to get into photography and took our cameras with us to get in a little practice. Full disclosure: A good friend of mine from worked loaned me her Canon Digital SLR. Well words can not describe how nice it is. Really the pictures say it all!

Let me share one with you, it is not actually from Bays Mountain, but it is one of the best ones I took this weekend:

This is a butterfly on the lilac bush in our backyard. This moment could not have been captured without the wonderful camera!

Okay, now back to Bays Mountain . . .

We also took some great pics at Bays Mountain. Here are a few of the good ones we took at the lake:

We also got to see some pretty interesting stuff at the Wolf Pen. They were being feed a deer carcass (GROSS!) when we got there and we got some really great shots. Just the wolves not the deer, no worries . . .