Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese Frosting

I found this recipe on Serious Eats.  I love carrot cake, plus I had a bag of beardy looking carrots that I needed to use up, so what better way to do that than with cake?  I modified their recipe a bit, mostly by cutting back on sugar and putting in more carrots and spices.

Recipe:

2 1/2 cups Flour
2 teaspoons Baking Soda
1/4 teaspoon Salt
1 tablespoon Cinnamon
3/4 cup packed Brown Sugar
3/4 cup Sugar
1 1/2 (3 sticks) Butter, softened
3 Eggs
2 teaspoons Vanilla
4 cups freshly grated Carrots
1 inch piece fresh Ginger, grated (or 2 teaspoons powdered ginger)
1 cup Golden Raisins (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°, grease a 9 x 13 inch baking pan.
In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, brown sugar, and white sugar.
Beat the butter into the flour mixture until well combined, add eggs one at a time and beat until fluffy.  Add vanilla.  Stir in carrots, ginger, and raisins.
Pour batter into greased baking pan.  Bake 40-50 minutes.

Cream Cheese Frosting:

8 ounces Cream Cheese
1 1/2 cups Powdered Sugar
1/4 cup Butter, softened
1 teaspoon Vanilla

Cream together butter and cream cheese, add powdered sugar and vanilla.  Beat until smooth.

This cake was surprisingly light, considering how dense the batter looked when I was putting it in the pan.  I also had some misgivings about the recipe because I was adding the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, which is usually the opposite of what one does, but it came out really good.

Instead of using all white flour, I used 2 cups regular flour, 1/4 cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup flax seed meal.  Also, since I don't have a box grater or a grater attachment for my Kitchenaid, I used the food processor to shred the carrots and fresh ginger and it worked great!

This cake was very flavorful, light, and not too sweet.