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I made carrot cake for the first time this evening!

Some notes and details:

• When I juice carrots, I end up with lots of carrot pulp. I had been assuming that the only thing I could do with that was compost it, but KTO pointed out that there are plenty of foods containing carrots that I could use it in, and suggested carrot cake as one example.
• I decided not to bother with the frosting this time, because I sometimes find carrot-cake frosting too sweet, and anyway I figured I should sneak up on this baking thing one step at a time. So I just did the cake part this time. (But the fact that the frosting is mostly butter, cream cheese, and sugar does sound pretty appealing. Next time. Or maybe tomorrow.)
• I used this recipe. Except I left out the pecans.
• There were various ingredients that I didn’t have (including baking powder and baking soda), so I bought them during a grocery run the other day. I was surprised at a few of the ingredients that it turned out I did have, such as vanilla extract and cinnamon, neither of which I recall ever having used before.
• I was also surprised to discover that I have an electric mixer. (A very basic one, nothing fancy.)
• It didn’t occur to me until after the cake was done that I like raisins in carrot cake and could have included them in this. Next time.
• At the 40-minute mark, it smelled done, but I poked a toothpick in (turns out I have toothpicks, too!) and the toothpick came out with with goopy material all over it, clearly not cooked. So I put the cake back in the oven for another 10 minutes, at which point it was definitely done.
• I let it cool for 10 minutes, then tried to turn it over onto a wire rack—at which point it stuck slightly to the casserole dish I was cooking it in. (I had buttered the dish before putting anything else in it, and had attempted ineptly to “flour” it but hadn’t done a good job with that.) So I started to flip the dish back over, and at that point the cake came out. Most of it ended up in one piece on the wire rack, but about four big chunks came off of it and fell off the sides of the rack. Oh, well, no serious harm done.
• It tastes good. I was assuming it was going to be at the high end of my sweetness range (2 cups of sugar to 2 cups of flour seemed like a lot of sugar to me!), but it turns out to be nicely not super-sweet. (I did use slightly less sugar than the recipe called for, but only slightly.)
• I’m pretty sure this is the first time that I’ve ever made any kind of cake-like thing entirely on my own. It was a little scary, but it went pretty smoothly overall. Pleasing.