The Amazing Carrot Cake Cupcake

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Excuse me while I have a moment….

I just had the best carrot cake cupcake ever. Quite literally EVER! I love carrot cake… but only if it has no nuts. I use to completely adore walnuts in my carrot cake until I developed an allergy to them. Yay for me because I totally know what I am missing. Anyway, I am gushing over here… over carrot cake cupcakes… and that’s okay because I am going to be super sweet and give YOU the recipe even though I would love for it to be my little secret forever. You know that secret where grandma dies and her grandkids STILL don’t know how she did it? Yeah.

It all started with making cupcakes for my mom’s birthday. She loves carrot cake so, of course, I wanted to make her the best carrot cake ever. To make it easier to transport and serve 14-18 people, cupcakes are totally the way to go no matter how fancy and layer’ish I’m feeling, so at 10:40 PM on a Saturday night I was whipping together the only topping truly fit for carrot cake – rich decadent cream cheese frosting. If you don’t like cream cheese frosting please don’t tell me. It simply might break my heart. I could eat it straight with a spoon. However, I do recommend making a glaze with confectioners sugar and orange juice instead. So good!

Anyway, back to the cake. I did what any crazy-out-of-her-mind girl would do at 8 PM on a Saturday. I had the brilliant idea to recipe hunt and think it would be easy peasy to find what I wanted (ha!). So I finally found and settled on a recipe that was kinda sorta right and adapted it to be just what I wanted, because, well, that’s what I do. It worked. It totally worked… not once but 3 times… but before I give you the recipe, two last tips.

1. Feel free to add raisins but my little recipe hack makes it easy to make every opinionated person happy. Who knew raisins were so controversial?!  I added them to half the batch and they were gone before I could get pictures because they are amazing.
2. Just for fun, use a fork. You say “but it’s a cupcake. You don’t have to use a fork for a cupcake.” Do. It’s luxury and tastes more amazing than picking it up. Just do it. It’s one fork.
   

The Amazing Carrot Cake Cupcake

Print Recipe

• Author: Heather L McCurdy
• Prep Time: 25 minutes
• Cook Time: 20 minutes
• Total Time: 45 minutes
• Yield: 24 cupcakes 1x

Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

• 3 cups flour (unbleached or all-purpose)
• 2 cups sugar*
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt (1/2 tsp. if you use salted butter)
• 4 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup coconut oil*
• 6 large eggs
• 1 TBS. vanilla extract
• 1  (1lb, 4oz.) can crushed pineapple
• 1 cup shredded coconut
• 6 cups shredded carrots
• Raisins (optional)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Put shredded carrots and coconut in a microwave safe bowl, cover and microwave for 5 minutes. Set aside to cool.
3. Put flour, sweetener, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a bowl and mix well.
4. In separate bowl, slightly beat eggs.
5. Add oil, vanilla, carrots, coconut, and pineapple to eggs and mix.
6. Add liquid mixture to flour and mix until incorporated, adding each stick of butter as you mix.
7. Mix until butter is well incorporated.
8. Put into lined cupcake tins and add a few raisins to each cupcake as desired.
9. Bake. mini cupcakes – 10 minutes regular cupcakes – 15-18 minutes
10. Will be moist on top but toothpick or tester should come out clean.

Notes

• To make it a bit lower sugar, you can use 1 & 1/2 cups sugar and 1/2 cup In the Raw Monkfruit
• Can use melted butter instead of coconut oil

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