Carrot Cake Muffins

Carrot Cake Muffins have all the flavors of carrot cake that you love, but in muffin size. Sweet, ultra-moist, with a hint of cinnamon and perfectly fluffy texture. Great for breakfast, snack time, or grab-and-go meals on the fly!

For more awesome muffin recipes, consider making my popular Bran Muffins, Cinnamon Muffins, Zucchini Bread Muffins, or my Raspberry Crumb Muffins.

Carrot cake is one of those things that I fought liking for so long. I don’t know, the idea of carrots AND cake? I was super skeptical. I mean, it took me a while to come around to zucchini in my breads and sweets too. (Like this Zucchini Sheet Cake.) But, not quite as long though I guess because my mom used to make zucchini breads and cakes in the summer so I had come around to that idea a lot sooner.

It wasn’t until I was basically tricked into eating carrot cake that I realized I liked it so much. I was at a friend’s wedding and there were four options of cake from which to choose. My husband (being the amazing human he is) brought over all four kinds for us to try. As I had spent the night dancing and talking to everyone and generally having just a magical time, I wasn’t really paying attention to the cake I was diving into. I didn’t even ask which flavor was which. I assumed you know, there would be chocolate, vanilla, and a couple fancy ones.

Here’s How You Make It

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a muffin tin with paper or silicone cupcake liners. No liners? No problem — grease the muffin tin thoroughly.
Next, in a medium bowl whisk together the flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
In another bowl, add together the oil, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla and mix well. Stir in the freshly grated carrots.
Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until they are all completely incorporated.
Fill each muffin liner with batter about ⅔ full. You want to leave room for them to rise. Pop them in the oven and cook for 20-22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Allow them to cool for 5 minutes before putting on a cooling rack to finish cooling all the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Should Eggs be at Room Temperature?

In this recipe, I suggest you use eggs at room temperature. Why? Well, because eggs that are at room temperature are less viscous than cold eggs. Meaning, they are thinner. When the eggs are thinner, they mix into the batter better and they also allow the baked goods to rise more. It also keeps the batter from being too cold, and thus allowing them to cook faster.

How to Bring Eggs to Room Temperature

I almost always forget to get my eggs out before I start baking to bring them to room temperature. If you can remember, then take them about 30 minutes to an hour before beginning this recipe. If you don’t remember, then there are some tricks to bringing the eggs up to room temperature safely:

Fill a bowl with warm water and add the eggs to the water. It shouldn’t be too hot, just warm water is fine. Let them sit for 5-10 minutes to warm up. You might need to change the water once or twice.
If you’re in a real hurry, put your eggs in a bowl and let warm water continuously run over the eggs until they are room temperature. Don’t let the water get too hot or you’ll end up with hard-boiled eggs.

How to Shred Carrots for Cake

I mention that you should use freshly ground carrots in these muffins. Avoid buying pre-shredded carrots, they will not be moist enough and you’ll end up with hard matchsticks of carrots in your muffins, which you don’t want.

Shredding carrots is easy though. Use the regular, large-size carrots for best results though (and to save your fingers from the grater while trying to grate up baby carrots!). Here are a few options for getting the job done:

Use a vegetable peeler. This will take a little longer, but allows you to control the peeling a bit better. Though you’ll need to make shorter peels to bake with, not really long, carrot-length peels.
Use a box grater on the finest grating option.
Use a food processor or blender if you want the carrots to be really good and incorporated. It depends on how you feel about bits of carrot in your muffins. Some like them more than others.
Use a grating attachment on your food processor. This should attach to the top of the bowl, then you feed the carrot to the shredder via the tube at the top. Follow your instruction manual for exact directions.

These are amazing right out of the oven (cooled a little, of course), smeared in butter and drizzled in honey! Mmmm…be right back off to make another batch!