"Please don't bake anymore," lamented my roommate yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago I baked my first carrot cake. It was pretty good but it's got nuthin on my chocolate cake. And as winter has not quite departed from the Northeast I'm stuck indoors for another weekend and I've decided to hold my own bake-athon. My roommate took half the carrot cake into work and one of the women there is paying me to make another carrot cake. So I'll do that. And I'm going to bake another carrot cake where I work on tweaking the recipe to see if I can't get it to be a little bit more "knock your socks off." I'm having serious visions of grandeur right now. Even though I've rarely baked anything beyond potatoes -- I want to out-do myself. I want to bake a cake that leaves me weak in the knees. Red velvet might be a bit out of my league (meaning it's above me, way above me). But the fact that red velvet seems romantic, delicious, and possibly out of reach makes it the ideal candidate for my overly ambitious, highly competitive self.

Time to consult THE CAKE BIBLE by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Time for my roommate to buy some pants with an elastic waistband.