Honey & Sourdough Carrot Cake with Honey Cream Cheese Frosting
With Easter approaching, I kept seeing carrot cake recipes all over and couldn’t resist making one myself. This recipe is an adaptation of the carrot cake recipe from Naturally Sweet by America’s Test Kitchen. This cookbook is another essential for anyone looking to get more into baking with natural sugars. There are delicious recipes in here and great explainers about the different types of natural sugars, as well as helpful substitution charts.
This carrot cake recipe uses honey as the sweetener and the end result is a perfectly balanced cake - not too sweet like many carrot cakes out there. I updated the recipe to incorporate sourdough starter and I used olive oil instead of vegetable oil, but as noted below any neutral-flavored oil will work. I also added a crumble of pecans on top for decoration but feel free to leave that out or come up with your own creative topping!
Hope you enjoy!
Ingredients
Cake
1 and 1/2 cups (175 g) all purpose flour
2 tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsps. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 c. plus 1/4 c. (185 g) honey
2/3 c. (135 g) neutral-flavored oil
3 eggs
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
50 g sourdough starter
2 and 2/3 cups (about 240 g) shredded carrots (about 4 carrots), shred on the large holes of a box grater or in a food processor fitted with the shredding disk
Frosting
8 oz. (226 g) cream cheese, softened
6 tbsp. (80 g) unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces and softened
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/8 tsp. salt
4-5 tablespoons honey
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease two 9-inch round cake pans.
Whisk the dry ingredients together (flour through salt) in a small bowl. In a large bowl, whisk the honey, oil, eggs, vanilla extract and sourdough starter together. Stir in the carrots. Add the dry ingredients and stir just until combined.
Divide the batter among the two cake pans. Bake for 18-23 minutes or until cakes are set and the center is firm to the touch. Rotate the pans halfway through baking.
Cool the cakes in the pans for 10 minutes and then remove from the pans and let cool on a wire rack for about 1 hour.
For the Frosting: Use a stand mixer fitted with whisk attachment to whip together the cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and salt on medium-high speed until smooth (about 1-2 minutes). Reduce mixer speed and add the honey and then increase speed back to medium-high and whip until light and fluffy (3-5 minutes).
Notes
Do not substitute low-fat cream cheese as it will impact the consistency of the frosting.
You can make this into a sheet cake by using a 9x13 inch baking pan.
You can frost the cakes after they have cooled or put the cakes in the refrigerator overnight and then frost the next day.
