I made a half-batch of these Carrot Cake cupcakes from the Smitten Kitchen blog recently and they were a delight. Perfectly moist and not too sweet.

I grated the carrots by hand on a box grater, which doesn’t take too much time. The only change I made to the recipe was to use more walnuts than called for, because I chose not to add the raisins. This was a great idea as there was a nice amount of walnut in each cupcake.

When I was checking for ingredients, I thought I had enough cream cheese to make the cream cheese frosting in the recipe, but I was short by quite a bit. I looked back at the recipe for the Spiced Applesauce Cake and realized I had enough cream cheese for that frosting, so that’s what I used. In terms of flavoring the frosting, I just put in some extra vanilla. Carrot cake doesn’t need anything else.

When it was time to frost the cupcakes I did kind of a messy job, in part because I wasn’t sure I’d have enough and in part because the frosting started to warm up too much in my piping bag. And there were a couple of times when it got stuck somehow? I’m unclear on what was happening. I thought I would cover my tracks with sprinkles but I didn’t have any, so they were just messy. But they tasted great, and there was a good proportion of frosting. A little more would have been nice, but really just because that would have given me more confidence to really go for it in terms of giving them a nice swirl.