Carrot Cake is a vegetable...right??

It winter in Ohio and that only means cold bitterness until after St. Patrick's Day, but even in the greyness of it all is a little bit of brightness. You just have to dig for it. (Insert cheesy life metaphor here, engage in eye roll and scoff and continue writing while snarky internal dialogue continues...)

It is always a bit of a shock to my out of state friends that almost the entirety of my street is comprised of family members (If they aren't family, we try to make them feel like family.) We know that nothing makes someone feel like family like feeding them like family. Thus, the family community garden, which stretches far further than any of the cinder block community gardens that I have built at my time at Hands On Birmingham. Corn, tomatoes, kale, Swiss chard, cabbage, squash, and other vegetables that have expired for weeks due to cold frosts, expect for the carrots.

With shovels and buckets in hands Saint and I head over to start digging for orange.  With one swift stab to the dirt up pops out grungy bunches of orange deliciousness, but once you rinse them off they are perfect. In days prior I cut them up with whole cloves of garlic and chunks of onion and roasted them with salt, pepper and black cherry balsamic vinaigrette. Simple. Beautiful. Delicious; however it could be better, sweeter, more chocolatey???

My dear cousin is about to pop out what will undoubtedly be the cutest baby ever and I wanted to spoil her with some sweet treats. Chocolate carrot cake makes me briefly think about what Saint ate when she was pregnant with me: peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Odd combination at first thought, but the more you think about it, the more you want to put it in a cake, frost it up, and gobble it down. (Note to self: find a way to make a peanut butter and pickle dessert and or cocktail...). Cousin (aka Twinsie) is no where near sitting on the couch and dipping carrot sticks into a giant jar of Nutella (Hmmm....), but a cake can and will be done and this is the ooey gooey result.  Totally healthy right??

Twinsie was the first person that I talked about Cody with and I did so because she isand always will be a romantic and love's biggest fan. For telling me to go for it, I will bake her all the love I can and feed her, her adoring husband, and soon to be People's Most Beautiful Baby (Smith).