The Best Carrot Cake Cupcakes Recipe
The Best Carrot Cake Cupcake Recipe - After a long search, I've finally found a carrot cake recipe I love! These cupcakes are full of flavor with a perfect texture, light and moist. And topped with brown sugar cream cheese frosting, a new favorite frosting of mine. Recipe and more at The Alchemist.
The Very Best Carrot Cake Cupcakes Recipe
This recipe makes about 28 standard sized cupcakes
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups (223 g.) all purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
1 cup (about 2 1/2 oz. or 71 g.) chopped walnuts - or pecans work well too - if you have nut allergies, go ahead and omit
1/2 cup (64 g. or about 2 1/4 oz.) raisins
1 1/2 cups (315 g.) granulated sugar
3/4 cup (177 ml.) vegetable oil
1/2 cup (118 ml.) sour cream or yogurt - it's best to use a yogurt that has some fat in it, try not to use a nonfat yogurt
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 eggs
3/4 lb. about 3 cups loosely packed carrots, shredded
Garnish
shredded carrots - optional
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 180 degrees Celsius, Gas Mark 4.
Soak the raisins by pouring hot water over them. Let them sit for about 10 minutes, until they are swollen. Drain them right before using.
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, whisk together the first 8 ingredients, the flour to the nuts, set aside.
In a stand mixer, or with a hand mixer, mix the sugar, oil, vanilla and eggs on medium high for 3 minutes. The mixture will be nice and homogenized and creamy looking. Add the sour cream (or yogurt) shredded carrots and the soaked raisins (drained) and mix well to combine. Add the dry ingredients and mix for just about 1 minute on low, just enough to incorporate it all.
Divide the batter among cupcake lined muffin tins using an ice cream scoop (or a spoon works too) filling to about 2/3rds to 3/4 of the way full.
Bake for about 19-22 minutes in the preheated oven. Mine took exactly 21 minutes. Make the frosting while your cupcakes are baking.
Let cupcakes cool before frosting.
Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe
This makes enough frosting to generously pipe frosting onto 28 cupcakes. If you are spreading it on instead of piping, you'll probably have leftover frosting.
What? Cornstarch in frosting? The reason it is there is to give the frosting a little more body instead of adding more powdered sugar and making it even sweeter. Powdered sugar is just sugar with cornstarch added to it. So I've just added a little more.
The molasses is to bump up the flavor of the brown sugar. Brown sugar is just sugar with molasses added to it, so I'm just boosting that flavor up a little more. If you don't have molasses available where you live, just go ahead and leave it out. It doesn't need to be replaced with anything.
Ingredients
2 sticks (1 cup) (226 g.) butter - room temperature
2 - 8 oz. (227 grams) packages cream cheese
5 cups (625 g.) powdered sugar
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
2 Tablespoons vanilla extract
1-2 Tablespoons molasses
pinch of salt
Directions
Whisk the cornstarch into the powdered sugar, set aside. Beat together the cream cheese and the room temperature butter. Add everything else and beat well for about 2 minutes in a stand mixer. Pipe or spread the frosting onto cooled cupcakes.
The frosting does keep well in the fridge for a few days. Just bring to cool room temperature and beat before using. It also freezes well for a few months if you wrap it well in an airtight container. Again, just bring to room temperature first, then beat again before using.