Mommy Baker: Jaxson's First Birthday

So I'm way late in posting this, but Jaxson celebrated his first birthday 3 MONTHS AGO! I can say I've been busy, but really, I've just not made time to blog in that long. No excuses, and now I'm back, with a long list of half started posts that I need to finish.

Jaxson was born on April 27th, 2013, at 1:59 pm. He was 8 lbs 4 oz and ---- in long. It was a very long, tough labour, but as is always the case, so worth it. It's amazing to me that a year (and more) has already gone by! It flee by even faster than I realized, and before I knew it, I was looking up healthy-ish cake recipes.

I decided on a carrot cake I found on a blog called Crackers and Carrots.

The recipe:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup organic coconut palm sugar
2 large organic eggs
2 small-medium apples, peeled and diced
1 cup avocado oil
5 small-medium carrots, washed, stems cut off, and cut into small chunks
1/2 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. I preheated the oven to 350°F and sprayed an eight inch rectangular pan with canola oil and then lined it with wax paper.
2. In a large bowl, I combined the whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg.
3. Then I used a hand blender to beat the sugar and eggs until they were creamy.
4. I pureed the apple, carrots, canola oil and orange juice together and poured that into the eggs and sugar. I then added the vanilla and combined all the wet ingredients until they were well mixed.
5. After that I slowly added the dry ingredients, mixing until they were fully incorporated.
6. Lastly, I poured the batter into the cake pan and baked it for about 30 minutes, until a cake tester came out clean.

I allowed it to cool slightly in the pan, then transferred it to a wire rack to cool completely.

I made a simple cream cheese icing and dyed it green for fun and assembled the cake in the shape of a 1.

Jaxson's birthday was the next day and we had plans to go to the pool and then go back to gramma's house for a BBQ and cake. Unfortunately, Jaxson got a stomach flu for the cost time that night, and so he spent his birthday resting and rehydrating after a rough and exhausting night.

More unfortunately, his cake eating celebration was put off for a whole month while first I, then Adrian got the same flu, and then we unexpectedly moved into the upstairs of the house we were living when the previous tenants moved out. This move took forever as we dealt with the filth of an uncleaned and unemptied house.

And so a whole month went by before we knew it. Thankfully, this cake keeps amazingly well in the freezer and we were able to delight in Jaxson tentatively playing with and tasting it. Also nice was that gramma was still able to be present for it.