Coconut carrot cake.

I realise that out of my last 4 entries 3 have been about carrot cake more or less! It really is a sign of not having a functioning kitchen or kitchen at all and being treated by Megan my carrot cake queen friend! That was a pre-emptive warning that yes we are talking about more cake (if the title didn't give it away first!).

On Monday we moved all the remaining items into our storage locker and were homeless. We stayed at Megan's and went out for dinner, which was amazing! When we got home we had cake to celebrate my birthday a few days early as we will be in Australia by then. The cake was supposed to be a surprise but when my husband opened the fridge and saw the cake he yelled out 'cake' and gave the game away. Ha ha! Lover of baked goods that he is, couldn't contain his excitement, even though he knew about the surprise cake in advance anyway!

The cake was perfection. She says she gets better each time she makes. It had some pineapple in it, which is actually what my only carrot cake recipe uses, really makes it moist. It also had hand toasted coconut on the top, which was heaven! The 4 layers is a Megan addition, making it feel even more decadent.

After all these carrot cakes from the Food and Wine LCBO magazine have been made I was curious how many carrots she had gone through. She pulled out this enormous carrot that they had found and said only 1 1/2 of these per cake as they are so huge!

I spoke to another friend yesterday who said she had been reading about these cakes and made the pecan/bourbon one and that it was amazing too! Yum!

I think this will be the last entry for a few days as we fly to Australia this evening and lets face it, there is nothing much to write about airplane food or airport food! And, we will be travelling for a fairly hefty amount of time! Will be writing from Perth next time!

Sushi lunch to die for.

I am loving having to eat out because our kitchen is packed away in boxes in a storage locker! I am also loving the countdown to the Australia trip! I am also loving the sushi we had for lunch the other day and how much cheaper things are when you can get there for lunch time deals! Woo! Lots to love!

We had lunch at our local sushi joint and as usual left full and content. We ordered tuna and salmon sushi, a veggie maki combo which gave us avocado rolls, asparagus rolls and cucumber rolls and a dynamite roll which has prawn tempura in it with veggies!

Pictures courtesy of my new camera say way more than I can! I actually wanted to go back for supper too.

Maple carrot cake.

We were back at Megan's last night for a post move celebration/payment of pizza and beer and she had made another of those carrot cakes from Food and Wine. This one was a very spicy cake, with lots of cinnamon, nutmeg and all spice in, and both the cake and the icing had maple syrup in! Yum! She has photos of both this and the double chocolate mocha version which I will add when I get them! I flicked through the magazine while we were there and the other versions sound just as heavenly. One has coconut in it with pineapple chunks and the other one that leapt out at me was the pecan/bourbon one. So sad that we will be away shortly and probably miss the testing samples of these! By the way, we just finished eating more cake for breakfast! Though I passed on the icing which was a bit too sweet for breakfast!

P.S. Our moving day (into a storage locker) fell on the one day there was a snow storm in weeks! It has been practising for Spring with mild temperatures and sun and dry-ness and yesterday we woke up to inches and inches of snow that kept lashing down all day! The irony. Today is beautifully sunny with bright blue skies, but when I checked the weather it says it is -17 with the wind chill - pick your preference for moving days now!