I love carrot cake and I kept seeing people post their carrot cake recipes online and decided it was time to try one myself.

The cake portion of the recipe wasn’t too difficult, though my ranking for time spent here is mainly because it took a while to grate about 3 cups of carrots. I also remembered why I hate grating things as it’s a potential hazard to your fingers. You mix the flour ingredients in one bowl, the oil/egg/sugar mixture in another bowl; then combine. This is already a very dense cake so be sure not to over mix. Gently fold in the carrots and walnuts (and raisins if you want but I left those out).

The frosting is pretty simple: 2 blocks softened cream cheese, 1 stick softened butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla extra. I was making the frosting portion at someone else’s house and since I didn’t want to dirty up a bunch of their dishes I used a hand mixer. I ended up frosting the whole cake instead of just the top portions of the cake and then reserved some of the chopped walnuts to use as decoration on top. It was a little sloppy looking and I might should have added a little more powdered sugar so it was more stable, but it didn’t last very long at the house so that wasn’t a huge issue.

Side note: I think it definitely could have been whipped more and probably would have been better in a stand mixer, as the cream cheese still had some small chunks in the frosting. This also could have been because I had used frozen cream cheese and when thawed it was a slightly different texture.

Between the hearty cake layers and the frosting, this is a very rich cake. Personally, I felt like it was a little too sweet but everyone else that tried it said it tasted great so that could have just been my taste buds. It’s a little more time consuming than other cakes, but was very good and it certainly satisfied the craving I’d had for carrot cake!

Baking Ease	10
Time Spent	8
Taste	10
Visual	9

Recipe Used: Pretty. Simple. Sweet.