My Favourite Carrot Cake | Community Recipes | Nigella's Recipes (2024)

FAQs

Why did my carrot cake flop? ›

When the batter is too wet, it causes the center of the cake to inflate quickly and fall halfway through baking.

Due to the cream cheese in the frosting which has a high moisture content, this cake needs to be refrigerated. The good news is that since the cake layers are made with oil (not butter), they will remain soft even when cold. Cover the cake well and store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Butter Pecan Ice Cream with Carrot Cake

Rather than just placing pecans on the cream cheese frosting of a carrot cake, take this flavor combination to a whole new level by eating carrot cake with butter pecan ice cream. It will blow your mind.

Alternatives to sunflower oil

Try olive oil or grapeseed oil.

Carrot cake is oil-based, rather than butter-based. This keeps it moist and helps it last for days. Unfortunately, it also means you lose the leavening power that creaming butter and sugar would bring. (Creaming, or beating together the two ingredients on high speed, aerates the butter.)

The ratio of wet to dry ingredients determines a cake's moisture level. If there's simply too much flour and not enough butter, a cake will taste dry. On the other hand, if there's too much milk and not enough flour, a cake will taste too wet.

With its mellow carrot sweetness, warm notes of cinnamon and nutmeg, and rich, tangy frosting, carrot cake is simply irresistible. This traditional carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is one of our favorites.

What you can't do, however, is leave carrot cake out on the counter indefinitely. If you want to keep carrot cake in tip-top shape from beginning to end, the FDA recommends that you don't leave it on the counter for any longer than two hours.

Carrot cake usually tastes better the next day, so it's a great recipe to make ahead of time. Simply keep it covered in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

Carrot cake (also known as passion cake) is cake that contains carrots mixed into the batter.

What pairs best with carrot cake? ›

Recommended Beers to Pair with Carrot Cake

We want more hops and bitterness in the beer to contrast the cake's sweetness, so American styles are the best. If you like double or Imperial IPA (the hoppiest of all IPAs), that's an even better beer to match this meal.

Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated culinary techniques approachable to home cooks. Cake is one of the best foods to make ahead and freeze. Freezing your cake after you bake it—but before frosting and decorating it—can actually improve the final product.

Vegetable oil contributes moistness far more reliably, a result of the fact that oil remains liquid at room temperature while butter solidifies. Liquid contributes to the sensation of moistness, and therefore cakes made with oil often present as moister than their butter-based counterparts.

To substitute butter for oil in baking just melt the butter, measure it, let it cool, and add it as you would the oil. Compared to oil, butter will create a cake with a firmer, cakeier texture.

However some cakes, such as Nigella's Ginger And Walnut Carrot Cake use oil, or a combination of oil and butter. Butter is only 70-80% fat and the rest is water and butter solids. Using oil in cakes reduces the amount of water in the mixture and can mean a moister cake with a tender crumb.

Why do my cakes keep sinking in the middle when I take them out of the oven? Make your batter a bit thicker with a little more cake flour, or bake a bit longer. The cake falls because the middle is not “set”. Drier batter and longer bake time both help it to set better.

For example, an 8-inch cake pan holds 4 cups of batter and a 9-inch cake pan holds 5 cups of batter – that's a 25% difference in volume! Using a pan that's too small can be disastrous. This can rise and overflow in the oven, and then collapse once removed from the oven as the structure hasn't been able to set properly.

A cake can crumble for a variety of reasons: overmixed batter, too much flour, not enough sugar or not enough shortening.