One bowl moist easy Carrot Cake Recipe with Cream Cheese Icing

This one bowl carrot cake recipe with cream cheese icing is incredibly moist and insanely easy to whip up. Carrot cake is delicious any time of the year – let’s be honest. But I find there’s something so comforting to have a slice of this softly spiced cake with a big mug of hot chocolate while watching the rain safely from a warm blanket on a cold evening. Here in Ireland, it rains an excessive amount so I always have LOTS of opportunities for cake in snuggly blankets. I try to always see some sort of silver lining, although my waistline would disagree! 😉

I’m sure that you figured it out from the title but just in case you missed it, this carrot cake recipe is made from start to finish with… you guessed it, ONE mixing bowl! (And the cake tins of course :P) Seriously though, even though 2020 has given a lot of us all the time in the world… is there any need to spend more time than necessary faffing about in the kitchen when you can whip together a super moist and tasty cake like this so easily?! I vote absolutely fucking not.

So tell me how to make this carrot cake already!

So how does this work? Well, quite simply you start with all the wet ingredients along with the grated carrot in the large mixing bowl, minus the apple sauce. Mix these together briefly and then add in the dry ingredients, followed immediately by the apple sauce. You can replace the apple sauce with crushed pineapple if you prefer, its a very popular addition, as shown in Sally’s Baking Addiction’s recipe which is exactly where I took and tweaked the recipe from! After you mix together all the ingredients, you then pour the batter into two lined and greased tins and baked.

When cool, make the cream cheese icing. This starts off by beating the butter until pale and creamy. The full fat cream cheese is then added and beaten again till smooth. It’s very important that you use full fat cream cheese when making this icing, if you use low fat it’s likely to come out pretty runny and not the spreadable consistency you’re looking for. Next, add in the rest of the ingredients and beat well until fluffy and smooth.