There’s not too many desserts that can beat out our love for carrot cake. A perfect spring dessert, this classic recipe truly never disappoints with its warming, lightly-spiced cake and rich and decadent cream cheese frosting. The only thing better than carrot cake? Shareable, bite-sized carrot cake cupcakes. If you’re serving a crowd this Easter, these cupcakes are the best (and easiest) way to make sure everyone gets plenty of this sweet-and-spiced, carrot-filled cake.

Top tips for carrot cake cupcakes:
— Grate your carrots. We use a hand grater to finely grate our carrots for this recipe. If you don’t have a hand grater, you can also use a food processor that has a “grate” setting!
— Don’t like nuts? No prob. If pecans aren’t your thing, feel free to leave them out of the filling and topping! Have another nut you prefer, like walnuts? Use them instead!
— The secret to moist cupcakes. When mixing your batter, mix until just combined. If you overmix, you run the risk of your cupcakes being dry instead of moist and tender (and nobody wants that).
— Top ‘em. We topped our cupcakes with toasted pecans, but you can leave them plain if you prefer, or top them however you like!

Storage.
Once made, store these cupcakes in an airtight container in the fridge for 3-4 days.

Looking for more Easter desserts? Check out our carrot patch cheesecake, Easter chick cupcakes, and carrot cake cookies for even more inspo.

Made this? Let us know how it went in the comments below!
Tell Me About These Carrot Cake Cupcakes
Flavor: These cupcakes are scrumptiously spiced with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. You also have brown sugar, a little applesauce, natural sweetness from carrots, and the tangy-sweet frosting.
Texture: The crumb of these cupcakes is soft and moist, but not at all greasy. (A difficult balance to achieve, but this recipe nails it!)
Ease: Bakers of any skill level can handle this recipe. You can mix the cupcake batter by hand, though I recommend using a mixer to make the cream cheese frosting.
Time: The batch of cupcakes takes about 2 hours start to finish, and that includes cooling. Cupcakes cook faster than cake layers, but they still need to cool completely before frosting.
vegetables. Give me a cupcake and a zucchini muffin for each hand and I’ve got the bottom of the food pyramid covered.

Alright, maybe carrot cake cupcakes aren’t the best way to get your daily vegetables, but it’s definitely the tastiest, especially when topped off with a very generous swirl of cream cheese frosting. They’re soft, moist, and cheerfully fluffy, these cupcakes taste like springtime and sunny weather (which I could really, really use right now!).
These carrot cake cupcakes are a modified version of my favorite carrot cake. The recipe is almost identical to the cake portion except for a bit more liquid in the batter — the original is perfect for cake but I found it to be too dense in the small space of a cupcake liner and added some milk for a bit of levity.

I use all oil in this recipe (no butter) for the moistest (sorry if you hate that word, if you have a better substitute I’m happy to hear it!) cupcakes, and thanks to the spices you’re not missing anything in terms of flavor, I promise! I found that butter just didn’t give these cupcakes the texture that they really needed.

I have a few tips on how to make your own carrot cake cupcakes turn out perfectly, so let’s get into that!
Tips for Making Carrot Cake Cupcakes
I recommend using the grate setting on your food processor to prepare your carrots, and then briefly pulsing them in your food processor for fine shreds of carrot. I feel like just grating them leaves carrot pieces that are too big, but don’t overdo it when you pulse or you’ll have carrot juice and it will impart way too much carrot flavor into your cupcakes!
If you don’t have a food processor, you can use a hand grater to grate your carrots.