Best Carrot Cake Cupcakes With Cream Cheese Frosting
When you’re craving carrot cake, but don’t want the WHOLE cake or maybe you’d like to freeze some of the batch for later or for kids’ school lunches…
CUPCAKES are the way to go.
And we all know the real reason we crave carrot cake is for the cream cheese frosting right?
I mean… cream cheese frosting just makes everything better.
Scraped knees, broken cameras (don’t ask!) and back to school fears.
What Makes the BEST Carrot Cake Cupcake Recipe??
{HINT: Use a Food Processor!}
Easy to Make:
I looked around for a carrot cake cupcake recipe that included both baking powder and baking soda. (More like muffins that way.) Plus I wanted to use my food processor to both shred and chop the carrots as well as mix the liquid part of the ingredients. Quicker and easier all around. I actually thought about NOT peeling the carrots I was so lazy, but at the last second I peeled them, hush up already.
And of course the cupcakes have to be VERY moist:
Every recipe I found used vegetable oil of some sort… some used canola oil, while others used regular vegetable (which is usually soybean oil). I went along with this option. But in the future I’m going to try using a tad less oil and make up the difference with yogurt. That’s how I make my favorite banana muffins.
CUPCAKE INGREDIENTS
In Large Bowl of Food Processor
3 Cups Grated and Chopped Carrots (Plus more is fine)
1 and 1/3 Cups Vegetable Oil
2 Eggs
***
In Large Mixing Bowl
2 Cups Flour
1.5 Cups Sugar
2 Teaspoons Cinnamon
2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
½ Teaspoon Salt
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
{SEE Temp Change NOTE BELOW!!}
In a large mixing bowl use a whisk to mix the dry ingredients, set aside.
Peel a bag of carrots. I had about 10 medium/small carrots. Then with a shredding attachment process all the carrots in a food processor. Switch out the shredding attachment for the chopping attachment and pulse a few more times for smaller pieces of carrot.
Next add the vegetable oil to carrots in food processor and pulse a few times. Then add the eggs and run for 30 seconds to a minute until the mixture turns fluffy and a lighter yellow.
Pour the liquid carrot mixture into the large bowl of dry ingredients and gently ‘fold’ the two together. When Baking Powder is used you never want to over stir.. JUST mix 10 or 12 times and stop.
You can use baking cups but I sprayed my pans and crossed my fingers they would come out of the cupcake pans easy enough. (In the end I wish I had sprinkled a little bit of flour into the greased cups as well.) This made 24 cupcakes.
{NOTE:} Turn the oven up to 350 degrees and immediately put the cupcake pans in the oven. Bake between 10 and 13 minutes until the tops spring back. I learned about the increased temperature thing from Alton Brown. The scientist in me loves this trick. When using baking powder the boost of heat when muffins first hit the oven activates the baking powder, and SHAZAAM! Magic happens!
While the cupcakes are cooling…
FROSTING INGREDIENTS:
8 Ounces Softened Cream Cheese
6 Tablespoons Softened Butter (I accidentally melted mine… see below)
3-4 Cups of Powdered Sugar
2 Teaspoons Vanilla
My happy little accident with the butter (please tell me I’m not alone in the microwave fiasco where I attempt to soften the butter and melt it instead?) turned out I liked the frosting a LOT with the butter melted? Mix the cream cheese, butter and vanilla together with a hand mixer, add powdered sugar until you like the thickness of the frosting. See how mine was kind of glossy and soft still?
I had WAY WAY too much frosting (you might want to make half a batch). Then again can you really have too much cream cheese frosting?? I’ll be using it on graham crackers, toast, cereal… eggs?? Okay maybe not.
I was going to freeze these and see how they held up.
Yeah. Good luck with that. They were all gone before I could find the freezer.
Next time I might double the batch!
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