Carrot cake with cream cheese icing is one of my favourite cakes. It’s rich and flavourful and it keeps for days. The combination of carrots, pineapple, walnuts and spices has such great texture and moistness and is always a special dessert.
I use an old fashioned box grater to grate the carrots and it has 4 different options for grating. I like the finer grater so the pieces of carrot are a finer size and not too big in size when the cake is baked.
I usually use canned crushed pineapple and drain before adding to the batter. For the icing, I use butter, cream cheese, lemon zest, icing sugar and a tablespoon of the reserved pineapple juice. The slight hint of pineapple juice and lemon zest give a very fresh flavour to the icing that adds a little extra pop. This is a perfect cake to serve for birthdays, showers or special holiday occasions.
Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing
Ingredients
Carrot Cake
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 eggs well beaten
- 1 cup grated carrots
- 1/2 cup crushed pineapple drained
- 1 1/2 cup sifted flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts
Cream Cheese Icing
- 3 ounces cream cheese
- 3 ounces butter
- 3 cups icing sugar
- 1 tsp lemon zest
- 1 tbsp pineapple juice reserved from crushed pineapple
- 1/4 cup chopped nuts for garnishing
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Combine oil and sugar and stir into a large bowl.
- Add eggs, carrots and crushed pineapple and stir with a spatula to combine
- Fold in grated carrots and vanilla and stir until blended
- Sift flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger into a separate bowl
- Gradually add dry ingredients in three portions into the wet mixture and stir until well blended
- Pour in chopped nuts and stir until blended
- Pour batter into a well-greased 9 x 13 or springform pan. Bake for 30 minutes or until the toothpick test comes out clean.
