Easy Classic Carrot Cake (2024)

Everyone should have an easy, moist, and delicious simple carrot cake recipe you can make when the urge strikes. This classic carrot cake is just that and it is perfect for all occasions.

This is my absolute favorite recipe for carrot cake and one that I have been making for years! It is one of those passed down family recipes and it always comes out amazing.

This recipe is an old-fashioned carrot cake recipe with no pineapples, raisins, or nuts and it has a delicious cream cheese frosting and a wonderful moist crumb. If you grew up eating carrot cake, you know how amazing carrot cake tastes, and we can all agree that cream cheese frosting makes it.

This carrot cake is moist and fluffy with the perfect texture and it is 100 percent kid-approved and reader-approved. In fact, it has been made for weddings, kid's birthdays, and holiday events.

This carrot cake is quick and easy to make and the flavor is like a sugar cake of heavenly goodness with the carrots blending right into the batter.

I will walk you through all the steps to make the best carrot cake that everyone will love!

What You Will Need

This recipe for carrot cake is very simple and only requires basic baking items (aside from the carrots and cream cheese frosting) to put it all together.

Carrot Cake

• Whole carrots (not pre-shredded). Shredding your own carrots when making carrot cake is so important. Don't buy pre-shredded.
• Eggs. I always use large eggs for baking.
• Oil. There is no butter in this carrot cake recipe, just oil and it makes the carrot cake amazing. I like to use lightly flavored vegetable oil. Vegetable oil will keep the carrot cake moist.
• Sugar. Granulated sugar is fine here. If you want a little extra richness, you can add a little brown sugar in place of the regular sugar.
• All-purpose flour. Try to find unbleached flour if you can.
• Walnuts (optional) for the topping only. Depending on how classic you want the carrot cake, you can add these or leave them out.
• Vanilla Extract. Look for a high-quality extract. Pure vanilla extract works best for this carrot cake recipe.
• Cinnamon. Ground cinnamon and carrots are a favorite pairing. You cannot have carrot cake without this spice.
• Baking soda
• Baking powder

Pro-Tip:

Make sure your baking soda and baking powder are fresh. If it has been sitting in the pantry for a while it may not be good anymore and you should invest in new ones.

Cream cheese frosting

Now I think most people will agree that the best part about classic carrot cake is the cream cheese frosting. Here is how to make it:

• Room temperature cream cheese. You can bring the cream cheese to room temperature by placing it on the counter about 1 hour before you use it.
• Room temperature unsalted butter. Same as the cream cheese above, place it on the counter about 1 hour before you are ready to use it.
• Powdered sugar. When making this carrot cake, I like to sift the powdered sugar to make sure there are no lumps. This is totally up to you.
• Vanilla extract.

How To Make Carrot Cake

You only need one bowl. Just follow all of the steps below and you will be rewarded with an amazing carrot cake.

• Prepare 3 - 8 inch cake pans (or 2- 9 inch cake pans). For this three-layer carrot cake, you want to make sure to oil and prep those cake pans! The better your cake pans are prepared, the easier the carrot cake will be to remove from the cake pans after baking.
• Whisk all of your dry ingredients into a large bowl. This is the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. This allows the dry ingredients in the carrot cake to be well incorporated before adding in the other ingredients.
• Next, you will add your wet ingredients and stir it all together. I like to use large eggs when making this carrot cake recipe. I use a handheld mixer for this part but you could use a whisk or stand mixer.
• Then you will shred your carrots on the fine side of a grater and then add that right into your batter. You want to shred your own carrots since it will add more moisture to the cake. I like to shred my carrots with a box grater and use the fine shred side. I find that the coarse shred side is just too thick and it leaves large shreds in the batter.
• Then add your freshly shredded carrots to your batter and mix until just incorporated.

• Pour: Pour the batter into the cake pans making sure there is an even amount in all of them.
• Bake carrot cake: Place the carrot cake into a pre-heated 350-degree oven for about 30 minutes.

• Cool: Allow the carrot cake to cool for about 15 minutes before adding the cream cheese frosting.
• Frost: I used the naked cake frosting method for this simple carrot cake recipe. Lots of my cakes like my Moist Chocolate Cake, Basil Cake, or Vanilla Almond Cake, I have lots of workarounds to compensate for my lack of decorating skills 🙂

As you can see it all works out even with limited decorating. The beautiful part of this cake is when you slice through it and see those beautiful layers!

Look at the closeup (below) of one of the slices of carrot cake! Those layers are why I love using three 8-inch cake pans instead of 2 9-inch pans.

Variations

• Add Nuts: If you love pecans or walnuts, you can certainly add them right into the batter if you prefer.
• Add raisins: The same as the nuts, just add them right into the batter.
• Make it into cupcakes: You can easily make this classic carrot cake into carrot cake cupcakes. See the notes below for this. You can also make this carrot cake into mini carrot cake cupcakes.

FAQS

What to serve with this

I love serving this classic carrot cake during the holidays. Here are some ideas:

More Delicious Cake Recipes

If you love this easy cake recipe, you may also love these: