Gemma's Best-Ever Carrot Cake | Bigger Bolder Baking

Hi Bold Bakers! A great carrot cake recipe is a must for every baker's repertoire and that's what I'm going to show you today. The best ever carrot cake. So let's get baking. A great carrot cake recipe is not something you create yourself. It is something that has been shared with you or handed down to you. Mine is from the amazing Avoca Handweavers Cafe in County Wicklow in Ireland and it is hands down the best recipe I've ever tried. We're going to start out in a stand mixer but you can also mix this cake by hand. In your bowl, add your eggs, flavorless oil, sugar, and vanilla extract and whip all together until nice and thick. You can still get this result by hand. You're just going to need a little bit more elbow grease. Okay great! After a few minutes of whisking, you end up with this lovely thick batter and this is exactly what we want to give lovely texture to our carrot cake. Now in a separate bowl, mix together your flour, cinnamon, and baking powder. If you're not a fan of cinnamon, you can actually leave it out of this recipe. I like it for a little bit of extra flavor. Then just go ahead and add in your dry ingredients into your wet and then mix together until just combined. Lastly, we're going to add in our finely grated carrot and our raisins. I love raisins in my carrot cake. Some people love walnuts so you can add those in either or you can add in both. At this stage, we're just going to mix all of the ingredients together until they're well combined and then turn off the machine. Lovely! Our carrot cake batter is done so now it's ready for the tin. Next, butter and lime a 9-inch baking tin. And then pour in your cake batter. In case you didn't notice, this cake is actually dairy-free so it's a great recipe to keep everybody happy this springtime. This guy is ready for the oven. We're going to bake him off at 340 degrees until golden brown all over and nice and firm in the middle. While our cakes are baking, we're going to go ahead and get started on our cream cheese frosting. Now I've made this cream cheese frosting before in a video for red velvet cake. It is really good and it pairs really well with carrot cake and with red velvet. I'm going to show you again how to make it because it's really easy and I do know that some of you have a little bit of difficulty when making frostings. In a stand mixer or a hand mixer, we're going to beat our room temperature cream cheese to make sure we get out any lumps. Okay great! This is lovely and smooth. Now to this mix, we're going to add in our vanilla extract, our room temperature butter, and our icing sugar. And we're going to mix them all together until they're nice and soft. To make a really good frosting, it's important that you use room temperature butter and room temperature cream cheese because they just whip up so much better and they yield a really good frosting at the end. Our frosting looks lovely. It's gotten bigger in size which is exactly what we want and it's nice and smooth. I'm going to put this in the fridge and I'm going to go check on our carrot cake. Our carrot cake is done and it looks perfect. Mine takes around an hour and ten to an hour and twenty minutes just all depending. But what you get is this lovely golden brown on top. We're going to set this guy aside and let it go cold before we decorate it. Now this is my favorite part of making a cake and that is the decorating. We're going to start out by cutting some layers into our cake. When you're cutting layers into your cake, get down nice and low so you can make sure they're level. Gorgeous. Look at that lovely moist cake. I cut my layers free form. I'm not too worried about them being perfect. And at the end of the day, you know what? It's a homemade cake and everybody will love it regardless. Once you have your layers cut, we're going to put a generous amount of our cream cheese frosting in between all of them. Spread your frosting all the way to the edge and in a little bit, you'll see why. Gently lay the next layer on top and then keep on building. I'm using a cake turntable which makes my life so much easier. On with the next layer and then keep on going until you reach the top. Take a little look at your cake and make sure it's nice and level. Now I know you're thinking this cake doesn't look so great now. But we're actually going to decorate it like a naked cake, which I've done before in a previous video for a wedding cake. It's a super easy style that anybody can do and I'm going to show you how. All you do is take your spatula and run it along the outside of the cake, smearing all of the extra icing coming out of the layers and creating this beautiful rustic effect. It's like icing a cake but way less work. To decorate the top of my cake, I generously spread on cream cheese frosting all the way around. And just like with the layers, you can just spread it on any way you like. To me, the more rustic it looks, the better. Now for another big and bold decorating tip. Pipe on squiggly lines of orange cream cheese frosting to make carrots. And then add on some green frosting to look like their tops. You can pipe them on just like the face of a clock so you have one carrot per slice. I'm going to eat two carrots because I always eat my vegetables. This cake is incredibly moist and the flavor gets even better the longer it sits. But I think you'll find this cake won't sit for very long. The best part of my day is receiving your big and bold creations on my social media. So if you remake this carrot cake, then please don't forget to share a photo with me. I really hope you enjoyed this big and bold carrot cake and thank you for subscribing to my channel. I'll see you back here again next Thursday for more Bigger Bolder Baking.