- Did somebody ask for the most delicious carrot cake
ever created in the history of the world?
Subjective, but it's my opinion.
It's moist, fluffy, perfectly spiced,
and covered in the best cream cheese frosting ever.
I haven't even mentioned the buttercream carrots on top.
Hey, you're watching Preppy Kitchen,
where I, John Kanell, teach you how to make delicious
homemade dishes to share with your family and friends.
Today, it's this amazing carrot cake.
So let's get started.
Before I do anything for the batter, I'm prepping my pans.
I already buttered my three eight-inch pans,
and I'm doing an optional step,
which is a parchment paper round.
You don't have to do this, but it's like an insurance policy
so if you dump your cake out and something's stuck,
or it's underbaked a little bit, or whatever else,
parchment paper rounds will always release nicely
and it's just a nice step to do.
I already drew a circle, I'm just going to cut inside of it,
three rounds.
One, two, three.
Last step is take a tablespoon of flour
and just kick it around the side,
because I buttered the sides that's exposed,
and you do want that to be well lubricated.
Those are gonna hang out there for a while.
Clean my workspace up.
Let's shred some carrots.
You can use your food processor for this,
or just do it by hand.
And we want one pound.
I'm using the fine grater, but the thick one works as well.
Be careful, this is the thing that's injured
the most people in the kitchen. Your poor knuckles.
You don't have to do this, but I have a scale here,
so I can just measure it out as I go along.
Halfway there.
Exactly one pound, okay.
This can get set aside, some scraps to nosh on later.
Now for the dry ingredients.
So, into a large bowl over a scale and under a sifter,
we're gonna add 300 grams or two and half cups
of all purpose flour,
two teaspoons of baking soda,
Two teaspoons of baking powder,
one and a half teaspoons of salt,
a generous half teaspoon of cinnamon,
a quarter teaspoon of ginger,
half a teaspoon of cardamom,
Oh, so good.
And half a teaspoon of all-spice.
Oh, all-spice
really should go in all of your baking.
All right, let's sift it out,
whisk it out, you want to distribute all those spices,
those leavening agents, the salt, everything.
Don't distribute it onto the counter, though.
For the wet ingredients, we're using three quarters of a cup
of sour cream, and yes, if you don't have sour cream,
yogurt will do. Plain, full fat, preferably.
So now, three quarters of a cup or 180mL of vegetable oil,
half a cup of apple sauce.
Using the apple sauce and sour cream helps you use
less oil, so you have a delicious, moist cake
that's not gonna be oily.
Oily cake is one of my pet peeves.
It's like, ugh.
One and two thirds cups of sugar,
it might seem like a lot, but remember, this is a big cake.
This is enough cake to feed, like, a large group of people.
Let's add in about two teaspoons of vanilla,
and three whole eggs, room temperature please.
All right, now we're ready to whisk this up.
This is a small bowl for a lot of ingredients.
What am I doing?
This can be done in a stand mixer,
or with an electric mixer as well.
We're basically ready to assemble our batter now.
There's one more step.
Before I assemble the batter,
I'm adding one cup of toasted,
chopped pecans into a little bowl,
and just tossing them with some flour.
That's 121 grams, in case you're not using cups.
All right, just toss it up,
this will help the nuts kind of like,
be where they need to be and not just sink to the bottom.
So, now let's assemble this batter, I'm so excited.
Pour the wet into the dry,
now let's mix it up.
We're mixing the batter until almost combined,
which means it's okay to have a couple pockets of flour
hanging out here or there,
because that's all going to get handled
once we fold in the rest of the ingredients.
Now we can dump in those nuts and all that delicious carrot.
What is a carrot cake without carrot?
Cake.
Most of you know this already, but all that carrot
will just infuse the cake with so much moisture.
If you want to click up here for my apple cake recipe,
it's kinda similar.
The apple cake has this batter that's so thick,
people are like, "Oh my gosh, this has to be wrong."
But what happens is, the apples release all their moisture
in the oven, and the cake is perfect.
So just make sure all those ingredients are incorporated
in there, scrape the bottom of the bowl.
Divide the batter equally into those three pans,
love that color.
Let me know in the comments if there's something
you add to your carrot cake.
I grew up with carrot cake that had pineapple in it,
and I thought that was like, the normal way to do things,
but apparently not.
If you want my carrot-pineapple sheet cake recipe
on the blog, let me know and I'll post it up.
It's a family favorite I grew up with.
Okay, so you want about 640 grams of batter
in each of your pans.
I zeroed out the scale first.
These need some cake strips,
this will help you bake in nice, flat layers,
if you don't use them, it's totally fine,
but you'll have a domed cake,
so you'll either have to trim or just
deal with a cake that's really domed.
Cake strips are on, let's bake these for 40 minutes, ish,
at 350 F, 177 C,
I don't know how it goes in other countries,
I heard there's gas marks, etc.
Let me know, I'm curious.
While my cake layers are cooling,
it's time for some cream cheese frosting.
This is gonna be a combo with
three sticks of room temperature butter,
that is 113 grams times three,
or one and a half cups.
Afterwards, we're going to add in 16 ounces,
that's two blocks of room temperature cream cheese.
Okay, we're gonna cream this with a paddle attachment,
and just, you know, make it nice and homogenous.
Get down there.
This is one time where you want things
on the colder side of room temperature,
because while amazing, delicious, creamy, tangy, and sweet,
cream cheese frosting has this annoying tendency to really
fall apart when it warms up.
So, if you get it to be on the cooler side of
room temperature, and make sure your cake layers are nice
and totally cool, you're going to have a much easier time
decorating your cake.
Now it's time for the sugar.
I love having those there because I would always
lose my scissors, always, always, always lose my scissors,
and I'd go crazy looking for scissors.
Now they're all just there.
This is like, the fun part of adulting.
Okay, so we're going to add in a lot of sugar.
It's gonna be about one and three quarter pounds
of confectioners sugar. If you're like,
"Oh my gosh, that's too much!"
You can add in less, it'll be totally delicious still,
it'll be a little bit more oozy and droopy,
so just don't go crazy trying to decorate
the cake perfectly.
The more sugar you add in, the stiffer it'll be,
and the more like regular buttercream.
Okay, I'm just gonna get this started a little bit,
Get it down, little babushka, and let's go.
It mostly worked. Mostly.
I'm so used to decorating cakes with meringue-based
buttercreams, like Swiss and Italian meringue buttercream.
You can click up here for my
Swiss meringue buttercream recipe,
it is perfect for decorating cakes,
and it is blazingly white.
It's like, white frosting, which is also delicious.
This one is more yellow because the butter was yellow.
Add a splash or a teaspoon or two of vanilla.
Now let's give it a mix.
Okay, let's give this a little taste.
That's very nice, okay.
This is going to go into a piping bag,
and we're going to decorate the cake,
after we make the second batch of buttercream.
So the decoration scheme for this cake is really simple.
We have the cream cheese frosting,
a little bit of nuts, and the buttercream carrots.
For those carrots, we're adding in one half of a cup,
or 113 grams of butter.
Now just give it a mush, mush, mush, mush.
I got really into those buttercream flower tutorials
that were from various Korean cake artists,
and one of the things they would do,
is make their buttercream by hand,
even for meringue-based ones,
and it wouldn't have any air bubbles in it,
and it would be perfect for piping.
So we're doing something similar here for those carrots.
If you want, you can totally make it with
the paddle attachment on your stand mixer too,
but it's not a big deal.
So I'm just gonna dump in the sugar.
I'm using about two cups of sugar now,
and I might add in a little bit more if needed.
What I'm doing is making like, a paste.
So I'm just mixing it in, mix, mix, mix, mix, mix.
We'll fast forward through this bit, it'll take a minute.
And it'll come, it'll become a paste.
A beautiful paste for piping those carrots.
I'm just going to add a drop of vanilla in to kind of
lubricate things a little bit. Here we go.
A little bit of patience is well rewarded
in this pipeable paste.
You want it to be really stiff,
so one of the keys for piping anything
with American buttercream, which this is,
is to have it be stiff.
You wanna have a nice definition,
if it's flowers, you don't want them to be droopy,
and if it's a carrot, you want it to stand up
with those little leaves coming straight up,
not falling down, especially if the weather
could be a bit warmer.
So now I have my paste,
I'm going to separate this in two batches,
a smaller one will be dyed green,
and the larger one will be dyed orange.
So, a couple drops of orange.
You know, carrots can be white,
but no-ones trying to hear that.
Orange carrots were developed
to celebrate the House of Orange, as in William of Orange,
as in, William and Mary! King and Queen of England.
That looks sufficiently orange,
and if you ever have any doubts, or are like,
"Oh my gosh, I don't know, this could be more saturated",
just know that all buttercreams, American buttercreams,
will darken as they dry a bit,
so that looks plenty orange to me.
I think I actually have a carrot hanging out here.
I think I used a lot of this green
in another cake.
There we go, nice and green.
Green leaves, green!
Okay, let's assemble this cake!
Nice and cool, look at those flat layers.
And if you're wondering, yes,
it was amazing getting them out of those pans.
They plopped right out.
That's all I needed.
Look at that, perfectly flat.
Fluffy and delicious.
Straighten it out, so just make sure you're
on a good foundation.
Okay, next layer.
There you go, that is a big, beautiful cake over here.
This cake is gonna break your heart,
you'll never have another carrot cake again.
I'm gonna get some buttercream coverage on this cake,
and then as needed I can add more on,
after the initial smooth.
Don't be too precious with this cake,
it's just a delicious cake with really cute
buttercream carrots on top.
Finish that up.
Now, let's give it a smooth.
Smooth the side out.
Cake decorating is so much easier with a turntable,
I could not even tell you.
Go and buy one.
Pull on the edge, we're almost done with the smoothing part.
Now I'm adding a skirt of toasted, chopped pecans
onto the bottom part.
If it falls down, pick it right back up, just like a friend.
I love that this adds contrast to the cake,
and also gives you extra crunch,
and I'm all about that crunch.
And any excess you can just take right off.
Okay, any other pieces you can just pop in on top
to give you a bit of gradient.
And now, it's time for our carrots.
The orange buttercream is in a bag fitted with a 1-A tip,
it's like a medium round.
We're going to pipe some carrots at different heights
and distances from the edge.
Oops, that's a baby carrot.
Look how beautiful that buttercream is piping,
there is no wavering, it's very strong.
Strong, beautiful, buttercream.
If you want, you can pipe your carrots all the same height,
and all the same distance,
but I like them to look almost messy,
so it's like a garden, kind of.
Now, I have the green buttercream in a piping bag
fitted with a 233 tip.
So each carrot is getting about two squeezes
from my grass tip.
And in between, I'm just cleaning off the tip
so I don't have any weird excess.
Here's where the just-in-case comes in handy, so
if you're like, "Oh, that's too much!"
you can just, push it back up like that.
And it's easier if you squeeze
but don't lift up for a minute, form a base,
and then lift up.
It'll give those little green pieces
a foundation to grow on.
And there you go, carrot cake.
The only thing left is to take a bite.
If you like this recipe,
check out my ultimate cake playlist.
It's my all-time favorite cakes, guaranteed to please,
you're gonna love them.
But for now, let's take a bite.
Oh my god, the cake just melted in my mouth,
slapped me across the face, and said "That's right!"
So good! You got to make this recipe.
Thanks so much for watching,
if you like my videos, hit that like button and subscribe,
and I'll see you in the next video!