Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is a simple dessert that always gets raves, and this pineapple carrot cake will have your friends and family asking for more. It uses a surprise ingredient to make the carrot flavor stand out, and it has oil instead of butter in the cake for an extra-moist texture.
Carrot cakes usually have shredded carrots, but this one uses jars of carrot baby food. This saves time, as you no longer have to shred carrots yourself, and it helps spread the carrot flavor around. The pureed baby food easily blends into the batter, resulting in a smoother consistency.
Pineapple Carrot Cake Ingredients
- Flour: All-purpose flour has enough protein to prevent this cake from being too flat and dense.
- Sugar: White sugar provides sweetness, of course, without adding moisture (brown sugar would add moisture because of the molasses content).
- Baking soda: This lets the batter rise; the pineapple provides the acidity needed to activate the baking soda.
- Ground cinnamon: This lone spice gives the cake a wonderfully warm flavor.
- Canola oil: Instead of butter, you’ll use oil to make the cake moist. Use canola oil because it has a neutral flavor.
- Eggs: This is the binder for the ingredients. Use large eggs to ensure you have the right amount of egg, not too little and not too much.
- Carrot baby food: Baby food is pureed and will spread the sweet carrot flavor throughout all the batter.
- Crushed pineapple: Canned crushed pineapple is soft and spreads very well throughout the batter. Drain it well, as you don’t want to add a lot of extra moisture to this carrot cake recipe with pineapple.
- Chopped walnuts: These add some welcome crunch in the soft cake.
Frosting:
- Cream cheese: Tangy cream cheese stands out among the warm and sweet flavors of the other ingredients.
- Butter: Butter makes the cream cheese flavor just a little more mellow. It also helps the frosting develop a better texture.
- Vanilla extract: This helps flavor the frosting.
- Confectioners’ sugar: This gives the frosting its fluffy texture and adds sweetness. If all you have in your home is powdered sugar, check the ingredients list. If it contains cornstarch, it’s actually confectioners’ sugar. Sometimes the two names are used interchangeably; you want a mix of powdered sugar and cornstarch here.
- Chopped walnuts and edible blossoms (optional): Many grocery stores carry small packets of edible blossoms, often in the refrigerated produce section near the fresh herbs. Don’t use blossoms from your garden, as those may have pesticides on them.
Directions
Step 1: Make the batter
Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Add the canola oil, eggs and baby food to the dry mixture and blend very well. If you use an electric mixer, beat on low speed. Add the pineapple and nuts to the batter and mix well.
Step 2: Bake the cake
Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans, then divide the batter evenly between them. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Let the cakes cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then remove them and let them finish cooling on a wire rack.
Step 3: Make the frosting
In another bowl, beat the softened cream cheese and softened butter until the mixture is smooth. Beat in the vanilla extract and confectioners’ sugar until the mixture becomes spreadable.
Step 4: Assemble the cake
Spread the frosting on top of one cake, stack the other cake on top of the first, then spread the rest of the frosting around the top and sides of the two-layer cake. Garnish the frosted cake with more nuts and edible blossoms, if desired.
Pineapple Carrot Cake Variations
- Leave out the walnuts: You can leave out the walnuts if you’ll be serving this to someone who’s allergic to nuts.
- Experiment with other spices: Cinnamon is the only spice used in this recipe, but you can experiment with adding nutmeg, such as in this traditional carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.
- Add raisins or shredded coconut: If you want, you can mix a small amount of raisins or shredded coconut into the batter. Use sweetened shredded coconut, such as in this carrot cake recipe. If you decide to add raisins, plump them before mixing them in to make them softer and juicier in the baked cake.
How to Store Pineapple Carrot Cake
Store leftover pineapple carrot cake in the refrigerator in an airtight container, and eat it within five days. Don’t leave it out on the counter—anything frosted with cream cheese needs to be stored in the refrigerator and shouldn’t be left out for more than two hours. Cream cheese is perishable, and while the sugar in the frosting can help with preservation by absorbing the moisture that would make cream cheese spoil, this recipe may not have enough sugar to make the frosting shelf-stable.
Can you make this carrot cake with pineapple ahead of time?
You can make the cake ahead of time, up to five days beforehand; refrigerate the unfrosted cake in an airtight container, and take it out of the refrigerator about 30 minutes before you plan to eat it. Make the frosting when you plan to serve the cake. If you’re eating the cake toward the end of the five days, remember that you’ll need to eat any leftovers within that same time frame. The five-day clock doesn’t restart.
Pineapple Carrot Cake Tips
Can you use shredded carrots or homemade pureed carrots?
If you don’t want to buy baby food but do have carrots available, you could steam them (try one of these ways to steam carrots) and mash them, or you could shred them and mix in a couple of cups’ worth (here’s how to shred carrots). The texture and taste of the cake will change slightly if you mix in shredded carrots instead of baby food because you can mix in those shreds only so well. Baby food or pureed carrots blend in throughout the batter.
Can you use chopped pineapple?
If you don’t have crushed pineapple, chopped pineapple might seem like a potential substitute. However, chopping or dicing fresh pineapple or canned chunks takes a lot more time than opening and draining a can of crushed pineapple. The texture of the baked cake would be noticeably different, as the chopped pineapple would be much more chunky than crushed pineapple and wouldn’t blend in as easily. If you don’t have crushed pineapple and are willing to take the time to dice tidbits or chunks, you could try. But using crushed pineapple produces a cake with a better overall texture, and making a trip to the store for a can is worth it.
Can you use another type of frosting?
Carrot cake and cream cheese frosting are like peanut butter and jelly: You don’t have to eat them together, but the combination has become such a standard pairing that people expect one when they have the other. You could use something like vanilla buttercream frosting if you don’t have cream cheese, for example, but the tangy flavor of cream cheese frosting really does blend and contrast very well with the sweet, warm flavor of the cake.
