- 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!
