Best Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This truly is the Best Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. The cake is supremely tender, moist, and bursting with great carrot cake flavor. The frosting is creamy, smooth, and decadent.

Moist Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

It’s finally officially spring. Though the weather can be somewhat of a finicky unknown during spring in this neck of the woods, nobody’s complaining. There might be an April snowstorm (no jinx, please) and puddles of mud, but it’s definitely on the upswing.

Spring calls for the appearance of Lemon Poppy Seed Bread and carrot cake, despite the funny fact that lemons reach peak harvest in winter and carrots are more of a summer farmer’s market staple. Thankfully, fresh carrots are available year round for most of us, and magical carrot cake can happen whenever the craving hits.

And when the carrot cake craving hits, there’s none better than this extraordinarily moist carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. It’s a family & friends’ favorite recipe which has ruined all other carrot cakes for us…fair warning, it may do the same for you.

The perfect texture and balance of flavors

This genuinely is the best carrot cake we’ve ever sunk our sweet teeth into, and that includes many restaurant carrot cake tastings. Here’s why:

• The combination of baking soda and baking powder gives this cake an extra tender crumb.
• This cake doesn’t skimp on the spices; your taste buds will appreciate the generous combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger.
• Brown sugar is combined with granulated sugar for a boost in moisture and depth of flavor.
• Four large eggs go into the batter, binding the ingredients and providing structure
• The cake utilizes oil to give it that supremely moist texture – we often use light olive oil, which does not impart any olive-ish flavors to the cake. Feel free to use vegetable or canola oil.
• An entire pound of fresh carrots offer plenty of carrot cake respect. The cake won’t taste like a big carrot, we promise.
• Whether you grate your fresh carrots using large vs. small holes of your box grater is your choice. If you prefer the carrots to “melt” into the cake more, grate them finer.
• Crushed pineapple is a legit moisture-booster in this cake. You’ll squeeze out all the excess juice from pineapple to ensure correct liquid to flour ratio.
• If you’re a raisin fan, feel free to drop in 1/2 cup of raisins.

Cream Cheese Frosting

This carrot cake needs nothing else but a generous slathering of velvety cream cheese frosting. Feel free to embellish it to your heart’s content with carrot-shaped candies or orange and green swirls on top if you’d like.

Just know that the cream cheese frosting is really all you need:

• It tastes like smooth, creamy soft cheesecake layers in between moist carrot cake layers.
• Do use regular, whole cream cheese.
• Salted butter provides smooth, rich, salty buttery goodness to the frosting.
• A bit of sour cream give the frosting a tangy boost, helping to offset the sweetness.
• Pure vanilla extract brings this cream cheese frosting home.
  
  All the flavors of the cake swing and jive so well together.

Make the entire cake in advance

You’ll love the fact that this entire carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is a make-ahead deal. You can frost and assemble the entire cake and keep it chilled up to a day or two in advance. Just be sure to keep it covered and not exposed in the fridge.

This handy cake container/carrier is super useful for storing cakes or bringing them to a friend’s house.

We love this cake so much, it shows up on birthdays and holidays often. We even have this simplified version for any day carrot cake cravings come calling.

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More to Bake and Eat

1. Best Blueberry Lemon Bundt Cake – This moist, tender cake is easy and bursting with berries and bright flavors to cheer up anyone’s day. Super easy, too!

2. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting – This is a super duper easy carrot cake in a pan that doesn’t involve layers but involves lots of moist flavor!

3. Banana Cake with Whipped Cream Frosting. An easy pan cake that is always moist, soft, and perfect for any time of day.

4. Banana Chiffon Cake. This light, spongy, airy cake is moist and tender all the way. So good and addictive, you can almost eat the entire thing all by yourself.

5. Best Ever Angel Food Cake. I never tasted real angel food cake until I tasted this. It blows away any store bought version.