Carrot Cake Muffins With Cream Cheese Icing

Carrot Cake For Breakfast FINALLY

I have been absolutely STALKED by thoughts of Carrot Cake lately. I get this sometimes with food. It’s more than a craving I reckon, because a craving is like an itch that just needs one scratch. But this kind of Food Stalking that I get will often last for weeks. I remember I got it really bad with Cobb salad in the Spring of 2021. I had to have about eight Cobb salads in the space of a month before the thoughts of it would leave me alone. And so it’s been with Carrot Cake of late.

Obviously, I haven’t been ignoring the insistent little voice – ‘Carrot Cake, CARROT CAAAAAKE’. At the first signs of a yen for Carrot Cake, I immediately procured some but it just didn’t do it for me. The cake-to-icing ratio was not optimal. I’m a proponent of the two parts cake to one part icing approach and any thing less than this is, frankly, abhorrent. I would actually opt for no cake over under-iced cake.

In my many years as a cake aficionado, I have identified ‘Carrot’ as being the Cake most likely to be completely fucked up by the various cake-purveying establishments. It is hard to find a good Carrot Cake. I’ve seen things go bad in every direction. Too much carrot. Virtually no carrot. Not enough bite to the cake proper. There needs to be texture but also it’s a balance, you need texture but not too much stuff going on – I love a nut* but for the love of god do not involve a raisin here, they do not belong in a Carrot Cake. Then there’s the icing cock ups. In my opinion, Carrot Cake icing is a cream cheese icing with a hint of lemon and no other icing should ever EVER be substituted in. I encountered a cake claiming to be Carrot Cake sporting a ‘lemon glaze’ and I said ‘NO. That cake is a fucking imposter.’

The most maddening Carrot Cake crime I’ve ever come across is committed on a weekly basis by a cafe quite close to my house. Their Carrot Cake is sensational. Moist with a good nut presence and A+ icing-to-cake ratio. So where is the problem, you ask? Well friends, these people make the most perfect Carrot Cake ever and then, for some completely fucking BAFFLING reason, they garnish it with a drizzle of dark chocolate over the top. An actual tragedy. It’s like, as Alanis would say, meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife.

There should be culinary malpractice laws for these kinds of situations. Or maybe a Baked Goods Watchdog to lodge complaints with.

Anyway, all this is to say that Carrot Cake’s been on my mind. I currently have a lovely office where I go to write and so every morning I bring breakfast in to have at my desk. Because I often go out to work and am allergic to spending money on things I could definitely make nicer versions of at home, I am big into packed lunch and packed breakfast. For breakfast, I usually do porridge (I have a flask that’s perfect for this) and fruit and coffee.

If I’m having a savoury kinda day, I’ll do a fried egg sandwich with worcestershire sauce and some white cheddar. When I mentioned this in passing to my friend recently she kind of freaked out. She didn’t believe an egg sandwich of this type would travel well. It does. I could go into exhaustive detail here about how I make this work but you did not come here for that, you came here for Carrot Cake muffins. So why am I telling you about this egg sandwich debate? Well, her point about the travelibility made me think about how one could go about making a Carrot Cake that travels well. Not a lot of cakes will travel well, you see. Their crumb may be too delicate and there is always the danger of icing displacement. But, I realised, if I had a personal Carrot Cake that was more robust and could travel with me at all times as I went about my day, I wouldn’t need to rely on the vagaries of cafe chefs who think dark chocolate is a reasonable thing to put on a Carrot Cake.

Also, during the Carrot Cake obsession era, I had begun to think very deeply about the possibility of Carrot Cake for breakfast. It feels like a breakfast-adjacent item; the bridging link between banana bread and straight up cake you might say. And so my Carrot Cake muffins were born this week.

I decided I needed a couple of things to nudge them more fully into the breakfast genre: oats and banana. My ambition with these inclusions was also to make something substantial enough to be a filling breakfast. Then all that remained was to decide on the best icing method for transportability. I worked up some sketches and eventually settled on the stacked approach (see below). This allows the carrot cake muffin to be wrapped and packed with minimal icing transfer.

Because I was attempting a cake-muffin hybrid, the method below is kind of unusual – in that I just dump everything in a bowl and mix together but it works! And as anyone who’s been around here for a while knows, I am allergic to extra washing up so this leaves you with only one thing to wash.