I just felt like I needed to make another carrot cake. It had been over four months since the last one!
Carrot Cake from scratch (almost)... < absolutefutility > 2026-02-03 20:20
I think most people like carrot cake. It isn't as sweet (or boring) as most other cakes. No, it isn't "good for you" because it has carrot in it. I know there are some people who might think that but, no.
Which actually makes me think of something I meant to bring up before...at what point does a muffin stop being a muffin and start being a cupcake? If you take a vanilla cupcake and add blueberries is it now a blueberry muffin and not a blueberry cupcake? What is the magic moment that one becomes the other?
Anyway...
So, I had some carrots left over from the roast I made last week. I've been munching on them a bit, but since I don't actually eat all that much, this pack of carrots was going to last until June.
Coincidentally, I saw Nigella do a carrot cake in one of her Christmas shows that looked spectacularly good, so I put the two together and decided I was going to make a carrot cake.
But I couldn't be bothered with doing the whole thing so I started with a jar of cream cheese frosting and a French vanilla cake mix.
In a bowl, you're going to grate a carrot. Make sure you PEEL the carrot before you get started and cut off both ends. My carrots were very large so I only used one, but you'll want about a cup of grated carrot. Not a densely packed cup, but a loosely bunched collection of nicely shredded carrot. Don't use the big holes on the box grater, use the small holes. Not the microplane part, they're the holes about the size you could fit a toothpick through - those are the ones you need for this.
Obviously, you want carrot in the cake, but you don't want it to look like it.
You'll need a cup of roughly crushed nuts. I used walnut and pecan because I had half a pack of each leftover.
Then you'll need some quantity of dried fruit. I used some cranberries and some sultanas, only about a half of a cup though because I didn't want a raisin cookie!
All of that goes into a bowl. Then I added quite a lot of cinnamon and ginger, some mace (optional if you use nutmeg), some nutmeg (optional if you use mace), a dash of allspice, and, because I couldn't find the cloves, I used something called "French Four Spice Powder". If you have that, you can use it like I did but I wanted to explain - the "Four" spices are nutmeg, cloves, ginger...and white pepper. The nutmeg, cloves and ginger are going to be important for the flavor profile of this cake, but the white pepper might be a flavor you're not comfortable using in your cakes. Honestly, in this case it worked out pretty well because the French vanilla cake mix was rather sweet on its own.
Then follow the directions on the cake box. This one I had was Betty Crocker, I think, and it was three eggs, a cup of water and 1/2 a cup of oil.
But I didn't have any oil. So I used half a stick of butter-flavored Crisco. The extra oil worked out well because the liquid added from the grated carrot needed help...also, I added the zest of an orange and a good squeeze of orange juice just to give it a little kick.
I mixed the carrots, spices and nuts with the eggs oil and water, then slowly added in the cake mix.
At this point, things took a turn because I couldn't find my Bundt cake pan. I know where it was the last time I used it but now it isn't there. I had some people come through the house over the holidays and I think, when we cleaned up at some point, things got put back in the wrong places. You know how frustrating that can be!
I ended up using two loaf pans instead.
Twenty minutes later, mind you, after I'd ransacked the kitchen looking for the frickin' Bundt! I almost had to go into the storage room and get one of the other ones I have in there! Fortunately it didn't come to something as drastic as all that!
I lined the bottom of each pan with parchment and some butter-flavored spray. Then I put the batter in evenly and cooked it for 40 minutes until it was done.
Now, the issue really becomes that, when Nigella made hers, she just did it in one 9" cake round. So, when it was done and it had a little hump in the middle, she just mounded it high with cream cheese frosting and then covered the frosting with more crushed nuts.
Mine...um...didn't work out quite like that.
I started with the idea of just icing one of the loafs so it would be pretty with nuts scattered across the top. But, after I started putting the icing on, there was way too much. Then I had the idea that I should have cut the loaves in half lengthwise and made them into different layers.
Unfortunately, at this point, I'd already slathered the top of the cake with frosting so I couldn't just cut off the uneven bit and split it in half! So I put the other loaf on top and made two massive layers! Then I covered the top layer with the leftover cream cheese frosting and patted crushed nuts into the top.
At least it still fit under my cake stand cloche without making a mess on the top!
The cake is absolutely delicious. Its much more "bread", like banana nut bread than it is a cake. But it still tastes very good! I think I'm going to use this method from now on whenever I need to make something like banana nut bread or blueberry bread or anything like that.