Take your carrot cake on the go with these inside-out carrot cake cupcakes — the frosting is on the inside. Surprise!
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When your CSA gives you too many carrots, you make carrot cake cupcakes and make your coworkers very happy.
Confession: as much as I love vegetables, carrots are not my favorite. I don’t love them cooked, I don’t love them raw… I just don’t love them. If they’re on my plate, I’ll eat them — but when I say we had too many carrots, I mean too many.
As in, once I started shredded them, I wound up with four quart-sized containers. Even if I put them on every salad and in every soup and served them as a side for every lunch and dinner for a week, I’d never get through them all!
So… carrot cake cupcakes to the rescue!
This was a very last-minute, late night decision, so I took the easy route — boxed cake mix!
I know lots of food bloggers will go on and on about the perils of boxed cake mix and how you should always (always! the world depends on it!) make a cake from scratch. To them I say: meh.
Yes, cake from scratch is generally better, but there are plenty of ways to fancy up boxed cake mix and improve upon it, and carrot cake is one of my favorite ways.
I call these “inside-out” cupcakes because the frosting is on the inside. And you bake it like this!
You don’t have to do anything labor intensive like core the cupcake and pipe it in, or cut the cupcake in half and sandwich it in there. You literally bake the cream cheese frosting into the middle of the cupcake, and that’s it. You’re done!
You could certainly make these extra decadent by piping frosting on top of these as well, but I love the easy portability when left “naked.” I literally tossed these into two gallon-sized ziplock bags and dropped them into my bag on the way to work. Easy-peasy!
Take your carrot cake on the go with these inside-out carrot cake cupcakes — the frosting is on the inside. Surprise!
A Bunsen Burner Bakery Original Protocol