carrot cake

i hate carrot cake.
maybe it's because I used to hate carrots. but now I love them (esp with peanut butter!!!!!)
but alas, my sister loves it. and it was her birthday (well last month it was!). and the birthday girl should always gets what she wants (even though she bought me a carrot cake on my birthday... i guess we weren't all meant to bake, but that's a different story).
So on July 30th, I made her a carrot cake from scratch. Like "hand-grated 3 cups worth of carrots"-scratch. And my arm was sore for a straight week! But ya'll, that's the secret. If you don't grate the carrots by hand, you don't get the finely grated carrot that melts into the batter with the nuts and the (golden) raisins, instead, you get those coarse cuts of carrots that stay stiff in the batter and do the opposite of melting in your mouth. and the last thing that I want to taste in my cake is a piece of raw carrot. Which is why this carrot cake worked for my taste buds. Maple cream cheese frosting didn't hurt either!

Recipe loosely based on this smitten kitchen recipe. And when I say loosely, I mean I made a rectangle cake and not cupcakes. :)

I forget if my pan took longer or shorter to cook but I used the trusty toothpick test and checked the cake incessantly after the 15-minute mark!