Classic Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

I’m in search of the perfect (or at least my favourite) carrot cake and this recipe has a lot to recommend it. It’s moist, very flavourful, not as sweet as most, and very easy to put together.

As with most carrot cakes, the main effort is in prepping the carrots “ a food processor makes short work of this step. After whipping the brown sugar and eggs together, the oil and the dry ingredients are mixed in by hand. The recipe does call for toasted walnuts and raisins but I omitted the raisins.

I made cupcakes, 16 instead of the 12 the recipe states it will make, and I found that they didn’t rise very much, but the cake was by no means dense. They were baked in 27 minutes and even if they had been slightly larger, 50 minutes, the baking time given in the recipe, is far too long “ unreported errata perhaps?

The frosting is a blend of cream cheese, butter and powdered sugar. It has a higher proportion of cream cheese and less sugar than most so it’s tangy and not too sweet, though I did miss the vanilla.

I appreciate the twists Joanne Chang adds to her recipes, in this case, the candied carrot strip garnish. I like to include them and, in fact, have borrowed this idea for other carrot cakes I’ve made “ they’re easy and fun.

I prefer the flavour of this recipe over the cake I made recently from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes “ it’s less sweet and the addition of ginger adds complexity to the flavour “ but I prefer the light, airy texture of the other. I’ll have to find a way to combine the best of both!