Zucchini Carrot Cake

As a child, I couldn’t understand the idea behind zucchini cake. Why would somebody want to add vegetables to a dessert? But now that I’m a grown-up, I love making cakes with grated veggies, including chocolate beet cake, classic carrot cake and pumpkin spice cake. I’m a fan of the extra vitamins and minerals that vegetables bring to the table, but I also love the fact that they help keep the desserts moist. Plus, making zucchini desserts with the bounty from my summer garden is always a win.

With a blend of warm, aromatic spices, a rich cream cheese frosting and some nuts, this zucchini carrot cake is hearty and satisfying. Serve it as a birthday cake, take it to a casual party or keep it around as a snacking cake.

Zucchini Carrot Cake Ingredients

• Eggs: Starting with grade A large eggs at room temperature is always a good bet for baking recipes. It helps the ingredients meld easily.
• Sugar: Granulated sugar sweetens the batter, but you could replace half or all of it with light or dark brown sugar.
• Vegetable oil: The recipe contains a good amount of vegetable oil, but use extra-healthy grapeseed, canola, sunflower or avocado oil if preferred.
• Dry ingredients: All-purpose flour, baking soda and baking powder give the cake its structure. Make sure to combine them well before adding them to the wet ingredients.
• Spices: Aromatic spices like cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger and nutmeg flavor this cake. If you find the clove taste particularly intense, you could cut the amount in half.
• Salt: Salt helps bring out all the other flavors in this dessert and prevents the sweetness from being dominant. Using some salt is a good bet in pretty much any dessert.
• Carrots: Use medium-sized carrots for the cake, and feel free to leave them unpeeled for extra nutrition. You can use any color to make the cake.
• Zucchini: For this recipe, choose small or medium zucchini, as they’ll be tender and have small seeds. Use a box grater or a food processor to shred both the squash and the carrots (use any leftovers for other shredded zucchini recipes). If you can find only yellow squash, that will work just as well.
• Nuts: Walnuts, pecans or a combination of the two are excellent add-ins for carrot and zucchini cakes. Some go in the batter, and the rest can be used as garnish.
• Frosting: For an extra-lush frosting, mix softened cream cheese with butter, confectioners’ sugar and vanilla extract.

Directions

Step 1: Make the batter

Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar until frothy.

Gradually beat in the oil.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and baking powder, then add the cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, nutmeg and salt, and mix thoroughly. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Beat for four minutes or until the ingredients are combined.

Editor’s Tip: You could mix the batter by hand or use an electric beater or a stand mixer.

Stir in the carrots, zucchini and nuts.

Step 2: Bake the cakes

Pour the batter into three greased 9-inch round baking pans. Bake for 35 minutes or until the tops of the cakes spring back when lightly touched. Cool for five minutes before gently removing the cakes from the pans. Finish cooling on a wire rack.

Step 3: Mix the frosting

In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese and butter until smooth. Add the confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Continue beating until the sugar dissolves.

Step 4: Frost the cakes

Spread the frosting between the layers and over the top and side of the cake.

If desired, garnish with whole or chopped nuts.

Zucchini Carrot Cake Variations

• Lighten things up: To make this recipe even healthier, use store-bought or old-fashioned applesauce instead of vegetable oil.
• Use a spice blend: Don’t have the required spices in your cupboard? Packaged pumpkin pie spice or apple pie spice is a good substitution.
• Add mix-ins: A handful of chocolate chips, white chocolate chips or dried fruit would add even more color and flavor to these cakes.

How to Store Zucchini Carrot Cake

Because this carrot and zucchini cake is slathered with cream cheese frosting, it should be stored in the fridge. A domed dish is the perfect way to safely cover a frosted cake. The cake will last up to five days.

Can you freeze zucchini carrot cake?

Once the individual layers of this cake have cooled thoroughly, you can freeze them, wrapping each well with storage wrap and then foil, for up to two months. It’s best to make the frosting when you’re ready to assemble and serve the cake (cream cheese frosting doesn’t freeze well).

Zucchini Carrot Cake Tips

How can you make this into a single-layer snack cake?

Bake the batter in a 13×9-inch baking pan to make this a single-layer cake. Usually, the contents of three 9-inch cake pans would overfill a single rectangular baking dish, but this recipe doesn’t fill the three round pans. It may take longer to bake the cake in a single pan, so add time accordingly.

Do you need to peel or remove seeds from the zucchini for this cake?

Good news for bakers who don’t like extra prep work: You don’t need to peel zucchini or remove seeds for baked goods. I like using both because they maximize the vegetable’s nutritional value, making our cake a smidge healthier. Plus, unless you use a baseball-bat-sized squash, the skin and seeds are tender, so you won’t even know they’re there. But if you have a big, older zucchini or someone who won’t eat anything with a speck of green in it, go ahead and peel it.

Why did the carrots turn green in my zucchini carrot cake?

If the baking powder or baking soda isn’t mixed evenly into the cake batter, it can react with the carrots and cause them to change color. To help prevent this, whisk the dry ingredients together thoroughly before mixing them with the wet ingredients.