One of the staple household kitchen appliances in my home growing up was a yellow Champion Juicer. My mother and father used it for making many different things but mostly I remember it being used for cutting up lots of carrots to be made into carrot salad, carrot cake and juice. It also does a great job of making soft serve ice cream from frozen bananas and strawberries. I also remember eating a lot of natural snow cones in the summer time. My mom would grind up lots of ice for us and we would put natural blackberry syrup on them. I think this is where my love of blackberries came from initially. It came in this concentrated bottle and you only needed a few drops. So yummy!

When I was in college, I spied this cream colored Champion in an antique store and I just had to get it. It was 49.99. That was a lot of money for me at the time but I knew it was a good deal and it looked brand new. I pulled it out on Sunday. I wanted to make some carrot cake and I had a fresh bag of carrots. The kids were fascinated by this appliance. I absolutely love it. It does a better job at cutting up things than my food processor. If you have never experienced one, you are missing out! Someday I would also like to own a new Bosch. That is another appliance that is fantastic. Food made from a Bosch appliance doesn't even compare in my mind to other ones. Quality in this case does matter!

The carrot cake was okay. I think next time I will tweak the recipe I used. I used one that was pineapple and raisin free. I would have loved to have added nuts but I was out of those. It needed to have more spices too. If anyone has a good pineapple free carrot cake recipe, I would love to have it!