Very Good Carrot Cake Recipe

Hey, what's up? Carrot cake is better than chocolate cake. What do you think about that? That's how I feel. It's good. Today, I'm going to show you guys how to make my very well-tested version of carrot cake. It's soft, it's springy, it's a little bit spiced, and it's topped with a tangy but well-balanced cream cheese frosting. To get started, I'll grab two sticks of butter, three blocks of cream cheese, and a pound and a half, or about 675 grams, of peeled carrots. I'll let this cream cheese and butter temper, then I'll preheat my oven to 350F. Now, to break down these carrots for the cake, I'll shred them with a food processor. I'm always conflicted when adding an appliance to one of my recipes because not everybody has them, but grating the 675 grams of carrots that we need for the cake takes about 15 minutes of elbow grease. That's way more time than the two to three minutes it would take to wash the food processor and the grating attachment, so that's the route that I'm recommending, but if all you have is a good old-fashioned box grater, that would also work totally fine. Once I've got all my carrots shredded down, I'm going to flip them onto my cutting board and run my knife through them five to six times to break them down even more. This will help integrate the carrots into the background of the cake and help hide their fibrous texture. I really hate carrot cakes that have crunchy carrot threads running throughout. It messes with the enjoyment of the soft, spongy cake. And once my carrots have more of a ground texture than shredded, I'll set them aside and mix my dry ingredients. For that, I'll combine 550 grams of all-purpose flour with 20 grams of baking powder, 10 grams of baking soda, 20 grams of salt, 8 grams of cinnamon, 3 grams of ground ginger, and 3 grams of ground nutmeg. Now, let's give these dry ingredients a quick whisk to combine, then I'll grab my stand mixer and start to mix up everything else. Into the bowl, I'll combine 400 grams of white sugar, 300 grams of brown sugar, 350 grams of oil, I'm using vegetable, but olive would also be fine, then 20 grams of vanilla extract, 8 large eggs, and then the secret ingredient, 250 grams of applesauce. This makes the cake super moist and spongy. Into the bowl it goes, then the paddle attachment goes on and I'll spin this until everything is well combined. I prefer to do this mix on lower speed so that I don't whip air into the eggs. That'll make the cake puff in the oven and then collapse later on. Not ideal for a pretty layer cake. And once these wet ingredients are mixed up, I'll grab my dry and shake it into the bowl. There we go. Now, I'll mix this on medium speed until there's no lumps of sugar or flour and everything is evenly combined. From here, I'll add in all 675 grams of my grated carrots and then I'll mix slowly to fold those in. That'll take about a minute or so and once everything's combined here, I'll stop the mixer, then scrape down the sides to make sure none of the flour or sugar have escaped the mix. Now, to bake this batter, I'll grab two 9-inch springform pans. If you don't have springforms, then I would recommend going for the sheet cake version of this recipe, which I'll get to in just a second. Next, I'll spray each springform briefly with pan spray, then I'll drop it in 9-inch round of parchment. To make those, I just trace the bottom plate of the springform to make a properly sized circle. Then, I cut it out. Next, I'll spray the sides and bottom of the springforms liberally with pan spray, then I'll put both pans onto sheet trays so no batter leaks out of the bottom and into my oven. Once these pans are all set up, I can add in my cake batter. I'll try to do that as evenly as I can here. I'll just eyeball it. Then, I'll load both sheet trays into my preheated 350F oven and bake them for 60 to 70 minutes. Now, the sheet cake version of this recipe is equally as delicious, just not as pretty. To make it, the mixing process is totally the same as it is for two layers, but the recipe is smaller. I'll put that batch size for your reference down in the description below the two-layer cake. Once the batter is mixed, I'll pour it out into a pan-sprayed 9x13 cake pan, then throw it into a 350F oven to bake for 35 to 40 minutes. While that bakes, I want to tell you about why I've been using Bob's Red Mill as my go-to all-purpose flour in recipes at home and on this YouTube channel for the last three years. How about a quick story? In 2021, I was actually loyal to a different flour brand other than Bob's. Then one day, out of the blue, it seemed like all of my recipes stopped working and I started getting very inconsistent results. After a lot of frustration, it became clear to me that the flour had changed somehow and it was to blame for everything being kind of weird. Ever since then, I've been recommending Bob's Red Mill to you guys, and now I'm very excited to announce that Bob's Red Mill is sponsoring this video. What a dream! I'm a Bob's fanboy because they use the highest quality ingredients and their products go through rigorous testing so you know you're always getting safety and consistency. Bob's makes a huge line of flours and baking products, most of which are in my pantry at all times, and I like that I can pick them up at most grocery stores or even on Amazon. I'll drop the link below to the unbleached white all-purpose flour that I'm using in this video so that you guys can make this carrot cake exactly the way I am at home. Back to the layer cakes. It's been 70 minutes and it's time to check for doneness. I prefer to use this purpose-made $1 cake tester because it's super thin and doesn't tear up my cake when I probe it. If the cake tester is clean, that means the cake is set, so I'll pull these out of the oven and let them cool completely. That'll take about an hour. In the meantime, I'll make that tangy cream cheese frosting. Remember that butter and cream cheese that we pulled out earlier? Well, now it's 100% room temperature and ready to party. So to get started, I'll combine the butter. I'll combine the butter with three blocks of cream cheese. Then 10 grams of vanilla extract, 7 grams of salt, and 50 grams of sour cream to bring some additional twanginess. Now the whisk attachment goes on and I'll spin this up for three to four minutes until there are no lumps at all. Halfway through, I'll come back and scrape things down and bang everything out of the whisk attachment. Then I'll keep on whipping. Before I move on, the butter and the cream cheese should look super silky smooth like this. Next, I'll add in 375 grams of powdered sugar and then 25 grams of cornstarch. The cornstarch makes the frosting a little bit thicker and it makes it much easier to spread onto the cake. Now I'll drop this mixer and spin the sugar and starch together for one minute. The final frosting should be 100% lumpless with a velvety matte sheen. Flavor-wise, it's tart, tangy, and has the perfect hit of sweetness. If you're making the sheet cake version of this recipe, again, the process is exactly the same, but the amounts are smaller. For reference, they'll be down in the description. Next, I'll move this frosting over to a plastic freezer bag. This is my DIY piping bag for when it's time to squeeze this frosting into the middle of the cake. For now, I'm going to throw this frosting into the fridge to set up while I deal with the cakes. At this point, these are cooled down, but still too warm to frost actually. At this temperature, the cake is very soft and crumbly and that means a lot of crumbs will get into the frosting and we'll have a messy, amateurish looking cake. So to firm them up for the frosting stage, I'm going to throw these cakes into the freezer covered with plastic wrap for as little as 30 minutes if you're in a rush, but preferably two hours. Two hours later, you can see these cakes are nice and firmed up, so now it's time to build the final cake. But first, I need to remove this firm, hard-baked exterior. Yes, this outer stuff tastes good, but it's chewy and has a darker flavor than we want. Top-tier cake shops trim all this stuff off and that is one of the reasons why their cakes are probably better than yours. Step one is to grab a long, skinny knife. This is a 12-inch slicer, but a serrated knife would also work. Then I'll carefully cut across the top in as flat of a plane as I can. Using a knife that's longer than the cake is actually a little bit better here because the tip will extrude the far side and you can get a much better idea of what angle you're cutting on. Once I get past the halfway point, I'll put my hand behind the cutting edge of the blade. That way it doesn't pop out and stab me once I'm through the far side. Now I'll flip this cake over and then do the same thing on the back side. This time, however, I don't need to cut as deep because the bottom edge of the cake is naturally much flatter than the top. The top side rises in the oven and there's a bunch of slopey edges that you need to get rid of. And once I've got the bottom and top side cut off of two cake rounds, it's time to clean up those edges. By the way, cake scraps are really good. Savor them. Next, I'll take a bowl or a plate that's just shy of nine inches and trace around it with my paring knife. Make sure to keep the knife perfectly vertical as you go. I had some oopsies during testing and accidentally cut a very weird diagonal angle into my cake and that was super hard to cover up with frosting. Once I'm all the way around here, I'll remove the collar of cake carefully without tearing it. Then I'll take off the lid. And now I've got a pretty fricking clean looking cylinder of cake. It's not perfect, but very good. Before I frost these, I need to firm them up one more time. So I'll throw them back into the freezer for 15 to 20 minutes. Next, I'll grab my favorite tool for frosting cakes. It's called a revolving cake decorating turntable. It's got rubber feet for stabilization and it turns so you can easily spread the frosting. Okay, first I'll squeeze three dabs of frosting right onto the turntable. Then I'll grab an eight inch piece of cardboard and smush that down. Now three more small dabs on top of the cardboard. Then I'll drop down my first cake. Next, using my piping bag of frosting, I'm going to swirl a half inch layer from edge to edge. Then I'll come back and use my flattest spatula to spread that out as evenly as I can. If the middle layer of frosting is lopsided here, the whole cake is going to lean. So take your time and make sure that it's looking mucho flat. Next, I'll drop on cake two, press it down, then I'll add on what's called a crumb coat. For that, I'll move my frosting over to a bowl and then grab a few dollops at a time and apply a thin veneer of frosting all over the whole cake, maybe a 16th of an inch. This layer seals the cake itself and prevents cake crumbs from being folded into the frosting layer. Just adding thick layers of frosting right onto the cake itself tears up the crumb and makes an ugly facade. And once I've got a thin layer of frosting coating just about every surface of the cake, I'll move it over to the fridge or freezer to set for 25 minutes. This makes adding additional frosting way easier. 25 minutes later, when I pull this out, it's finally time to finish. From here, I'll add on my frosting layer and just spread it around evenly the best I can. I want the outer layer to be slightly thicker than a quarter inch overall. My best advice for applying frosting would be to always keep a thick bead of frosting under your spatula and use gentle pressure. You never want to be scraping the cake with a bare spatula because that will remove frosting, not apply it. Also, when it comes to the sides, I think it's best to apply a lot of frosting at once, then position the spatula vertically and use the rotating motion of the platform to do all the work for you. This is kind of a practice makes perfect situation and it's hard to teach with video and words alone. You kind of have to do it to know how to do it. As long as you get it on there relatively evenly, you're going to be happy with the results. Now, the final step here is to add a little bit of crunch on the outside of the cake. To do that, I'll grab a large bowl, drop my cake into it, then grab eight ounces of toasted chopped pecans. I'm going to spread these out on the side so only the five or six bites of the edge of the cake have some crunchy nut texture. I really hate it when people put stuff inside of cake like raisins or nuts. I mean, the flavor of nuts is very complimentary here, but when it's on the inside, it kind of steps on the entire reason that I'm eating cake in the first place, which is to luxuriate in softness. Cake shouldn't be crunchy. That being said, a little bit of nutty texture on the outside brings some contrast and puts a nice period on the end of the sentence. The final step here will be to take a dull knife and scrape off the excessive pecans from the bottom edge, then very, very carefully lift this cake off its platform with a spatula and move it over to a plate or a dish that's easier to transport. And if you're following the sheet cake storyline in this video, now would be the time to use that frosting. The process here doesn't really need any instruction other than keep the frosting flowing and try to make it pretty. The eating experience of this sheet cake is actually very, very similar to the layer cake. It's just that it's not as pretty and there's probably a little bit less frosting overall. It's still miles better than anything you could go buy at the store and it's really not very much work. When I cut into the layer cake though, oh my God, you can see it's perfectly frosted down the sides and throughout the middle and the cake itself is so obviously moist. It's spiced brown sugar cake that's soft and spongy. It's got a little kick from the ground ginger and the acidity of the frosting on top brings the whole thing into a perfect balance. I really think going through the trouble of making this cake is worth it because making pretty things is inherently fun and the results are pleasurable. I really hope you guys go for this one sometime soon. And if you do, please tag me on Instagram. Now let's eat this thing.