The Ultimate Carrot Cake With Orange Cream Cheese Frosting
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This carrot cake contains all the usual ingredients that make carrot cake distinct — carrots, cinnamon, walnuts — but with a bit (or more than a bit) more of everything!
The cream cheese frosting is mostly cream cheese with just enough butter to make it fluffy. I add orange zest and juice, because my mom added orange to hers (in her case a spoonful of frozen orange juice from concentrate; it was the 1970s, after all), a trick she learned from a recipe she clipped from our local newspaper. So we’ve gone full circle. Carrot and orange is a natural pairing, so I’m not sure why orange isn’t always a part of the frosting. It should be.
One of the great, mysterious miracles in baking is that carrot cake gets even more moist with time. Once the cake cools in the pan, you can wrap the pan, or take it out of the pan and wrap the cake in plastic wrap. Leave it at room temperature or refrigerate it for up to 2 days before frosting it.
Make the cake: Grease an 8-inch square or 9-inch round cake pan with oil. Put an oven rack in the center position and heat the oven to 350 degrees.
Spread the walnuts out on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven for about 15 minutes, shaking the pan or otherwise checking on the walnuts after about 10 minutes to make sure they’re toasting evenly and not burning. Remove the walnuts from the oven and cool to room temperature. (If you think they may be on the verge of being over-toasted, slide them onto a plate so they don’t continue to cook from the heat of the baking sheet.)
Put the oil, granulated sugar, brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, clove and allspice (if you’re using either or both of them) in a mixing bowl and whisk to combine them. Use a Microplane (if you don’t have one, get one!) to grate the ginger directly into the bowl. Add the baking powder, baking soda and salt, and stir them in. Stir in the carrots. Break the walnuts into the bowl with your hands. Add the flour. You guessed it: stir!
Pour the batter into the baking pan. Shake the pan or use the spatula to level out the batter if necessary. Bake the cake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, until the cake has just started pulling away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and set it aside to cool to room temperature. (This is important. If you wait until the cake is cool, you are more likely to get the cake out of the pan in one piece, so just hold your horses. Wash the dishes or go take a walk.)
While the cake is baking, make the frosting. Put the cream cheese and butter in a deep mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Use beaters or the stand mixer to whip the ingredients together at medium speed until they’re combined. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl.
Add the sugar, and beat it in on low speed so it doesn’t fly out of the bowl. Increase the speed to high and beat for a couple of minutes until the ingredients are combined and the frosting is fluffy; you’ll have to stop and scrape the frosting away from the sides of the bowl a couple of times in the process.
Stop, scrape and use a fine Microplane to grate the orange zest into the bowl; only grate the very outermost, shiny, bright orange part of the orange. (That’s where the oils and flavor are. The rest is bitter. Really, grate more superficially than you think you should.)
Cut the orange in half and add 1 tablespoon of the juice to the frosting. Whip on medium to high speed to combine. Stop the mixer, get all the frosting you can off the beaters and frost the cake. (Or refrigerate the frosting until you’re ready to frost it.)
When the cake is cool, run a metal spatula (I use a fish spatula, which needs a new name because I use this just about any time I need a spatula) or a knife around the edges to loosen the cake from the pan. Invert the cake onto a platter, cutting board, marble slab, cake stand or whatever you want to serve it on.
Plop the icing onto the center of the cake and use an offset spatula or the back of a large spoon to spread it over the surface of the cake in big swirls, or whatever way looks pretty to you.
Use a channel zester to zest a few wisps of zest on top of the cake if you like. You can also top it with finely broken up walnuts.
Eat your way across L.A.
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