This was a productive weekend. I finally hung up the the little raincloud mobile I made…

…along with two paper lamps from the Japanese supermarket.

Then, I drilled drainage holes into my darling Anthropologie “Perch planters.” The store had a 20% off sale recently, and I checked out with a whole mess of fish-shaped planters because that’s the kind of person I am.

Aside: why don’t more cute planters come with drainage holes? Having those makes a huge difference in plant mortality. I mean, let’s not even talk about the Terrible Thyme Tragedy of 2013, or the Great Succulent Massacre of 2014 — for me, the grief is still too near.

Planters need outlets for water runoff or else you risk overwatering your plants (which will kill them), or underwatering them for fear of overwatering (which will also kill them). Now all the planters I buy get drainage holes punched into them.

I don’t have a clever segue planned, so I’ll just abruptly drag us back to the point of this post: I also spent the weekend baking a tasty carrot cake.

But let me admit right now that the photographs here are actually of Cake Number Two because the first cake I made turned out so ugly that I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing it to the office. It was weirdly uneven, with the whole thing taller on one side than the other. If a cake could have a hunchback, this one definitely did. As if that weren’t enough, I tried a new frosting technique, but it ended up looking less like a très chic gâteau and more like it just had a bad case of shingles.

So here is attempt number two, with some happy adjustments to make it all look as wonderful as it tastes.

Every month, I make a cake for my coworkers to celebrate that month’s office birthdays. When I remember, I like to ask one of the birthday babies what kind of cake they’d like. This month, the request was for a carrot cake, so I set out to make one that was softer and more interesting than the dense, spongy grocery store carrot cakes I grew up with.

This graham cracker carrot cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen was just that. It’s fluffy and moist, and the carrots are barely perceptible aside from providing their own natural sweetness and bursts of bright orange color. Much preferable to some of the coleslaw-textured carrot cakes I’ve had in the past. No thanks.

The inclusion of graham crackers gives it a little something different, though I wouldn’t say that you really taste it in the cake. I did have to increase the batter recipe by half to get three layers, though. For whatever reason, when I used Deb’s recipe to the letter, it only produced enough batter for two really thin layers. The recipe below is with the measurements I ended up using for Round Two.

In addition to graham crackers, I ground up some ginger thins because I happened to have those in my pantry. I suspect you could also substitute any dry cookie of your choice for the graham crackers, though whatever it is, you should still pulverize it to a fine powder before incorporating it into the batter.