Happy weekend, everyone! I was so ready for this weekend – I can’t even tell you! I have had a pretty productive day around the house. I cleaned, did laundry, baked carrot cake cupcakes and I made a salad for dinner tonight. Wow, I haven’t sat down all day – and it’s 2:45 now. I’m a little wiped!

This morning I started the cupcakes bright and early – around 9 o’clock this morning. First I had to grate three cups of carrots:

Then I put together the dry ingredients and started mixing the wet ingredients together:

Once I had sifted the dry ingredients into the wet, I slowly folded in the grated carrots. The batter was really thick before I started folding in the carrots – I was a little nervous. But thankfully the carrots really changed the batter – of course there is some water mixed into the carrots, that helped!

I made 24 cupcakes:

Here is the final product:

I tasted one cupcake (thankfully one was smaller than the rest – the bowl scrapings at the very end!) because I had never used this recipe before, I wanted to know what I was asking people to taste. This recipe was actually from America’s Test Kitchen’s cookbook. It was their “light” carrot cake recipe. I like the recipe a lot and I will definitely use it again! I didn’t go light on the frosting though 🙂 I used 4 tablespoons of butter, 1 cup of confectioner sugar, 8 ounces of reduced fat cream cheese and a little more than 1/2 a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. This frosting was amazing – and I definitely ate too much of it as I was decorating the cupcakes. It was a mess as I was piping it out.

While the cupcakes were baking, I threw together a salad for tonight’s dinner. I had a mango, a red pepper, black beans, cucumber, and a not quite ripe avocado… here is what I came up with:

I flavored everything with the juice of two limes and a teaspoon of EVOO. I am going to chop up some cilantro right before I serve it.

OK, I’m off – cupcakes and salad in tow. I’ll check back in and let you know how both things go over. I hope you are having an amazing weekend!