Welcome to another edition of “Tracy uses her cellphone for a blog post!”

Mission: Make a tasty cake for girl’s night in an hour or less.

Picture this. I spent the day waiting for Casey’s work to let him know if he had to fly out for work that night (which meant I would miss Glee with the girls) or the next morning (I could go to Glee with the girls!).  If I could go, I’d have to bring dessert for the 5 of us. If not, then I’d sit at home watching it by my lonesome.  This waffling back and forth happened ALL. DAY. LONG. And finally, at 5pm (1 1/2 hours before I was supposed to be at my friend’s house) I got the green light that I COULD GO! Flight was booked for the next morning! Awesome.

So with an hour to whip something up, I enlisted the help of Cooper to make this little cake. I pulled a box of Trader Joe’s Deep Dark Gingerbread Cake Mix from the pantry and added a few ingredients and tada! We have a Carrot Gingerbread Cake. The cake was moist & spicy and the Brown Butter Icing was STELLAR. The girls loved it, just as much as Glee! You might need to think of Coach Beast to help you cool off from eating a slice….but a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream just might do the trick!

It all started with a box of Trader Joe’s Gingerbread Cake Mix.

I bought Trader Joe’s shredded carrots to jazz it up! Carrot Cake anyone?

I started whipping up the mix and added about 2 small handfuls of golden raisins.

The little man helped me in the process. I gave him a bowl of flour and some raisins to play with.

He LOVED it. Although he made a mess, I really liked having him next to me.

I chopped up about 1 cup shredded carrots.

Added them to the bowl with the raisins & gingerbread mix, egg, water & oil.

Put the mix into a lubed brownie pan. And off to the oven it went!

Took about 30 minutes.

Then Cooper and I cleaned up the kitchen while our cake baked.

I’m teaching him what my mom taught me–A good cook always cleans up!

We’ll see how that goes…..

After the cake cooled, I made  Brown Butter Icing. It’s SOO simple.

Here’s my butter browning.

I slathered the icing on top of the cake. There were parts that didn’t get evenly coated and looked kinda weird.

I took a fork and made a little pattern to help conceal it.

Not the prettiest cake, but it sure was TASTY.

Brown Butter Icing makes everything better!