Saturday Baking - Carrot Cake and Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This evening I am exhausted after a day full of shopping, baking and cleaning. This morning I hit two different grocery stores to take advantage of their sales and coupons. (I will post more on that tomorrow). Then this afternoon I did my usual Saturday baking and of course I had to clean the house. So now I am exhausted and ready to curl up with a good book, but first, more about my baking.

Friday night hubby picked up some oatmeal raising cookies for pumpkin. Well, they were left unattended and the dogs got them. Since she already knew about the cookies (but not the dogs eating them) I wound up having to make some oatmeal raising cookies today. My all time favorite recipe for these is the Quaker Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies recipe. You can also find it inside the lid of Quaker oatmeal. The cookies turned out just as yummy as they always do and are quickly vanishing from the kitchen.

For the last few weeks I have been trying to make a carrot cake and this weekend I finally decided to go ahead and do it. I decided to try this recipe since it had good ratings on Allrecipes. I also wound up making cupcakes instead of an actual cake. Pumpkin loves cupcakes so most cake like items get made into cupcakes anymore. Anyway, I have to say that I wasn't crazy about this recipe and will have to try another one next time. The recipe isn't bad, but it just seemed really bland to me. Now I did leave out the pecans since my daughter will be eating them, but I don't really think the pecans would have made much difference. So does anyone have a good carrot cake recipe they would like to recommend? Since we all LOVE carrot cake I really would like to find a good recipe.