Ina Garten ‘Turned up the Volume’ for Her Carrot Cake Recipe With These 2 Secret Ingredients

Carrot cake is not hyped up nearly enough. It’s sweet, a bit savory, and it’s good for you, too — at least, that’s what we tell ourselves. It is made with carrots after all. If you’re a carrot cake stan, then you’re definitely going to want to add Ina Garten’s carrot cake recipe to your list of carrot cakes to try. It’s a classic cake with “the volume turned up” thanks to two unique ingredients that give it more of a bite than cakes you’ve had in the past.

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“Everybody loves carrot cake for birthday cake, and I thought, I’m going to really turn up the volume,” Garten said in a clip from Barefoot Contessa posted to Food Network’s Instagram account. “Instead of just cream cheese frosting, I’m going to add mascarpone to it. And in the carrot cake itself, I’m putting in crystalized ginger to give great heat. It’s going to be a really fabulous carrot cake.”

Yum, yum, and more yum.

“Carrot cake is really easy to make, and I love it,” Garten said, and she’s so right. If you can mix ingredients together, you can make this cake.

Her recipe starts as all carrot cake recipes do, by shredding a boatload of carrots (a whole pound to be exact). After those carrots get shredded, you make your cake batter by mixing together your wet ingredients first — sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla extract — and then adding in your dry — flour, ground cinnamon, baking soda, and salt, all sifted together.

To her shredded carrots, Garten adds chopped walnuts, raisins, and chopped crystalized ginger. “Crystalized ginger is really hot and sweet at the same time,” Garten said, which adds an unexpected pop of flavor to the cake. Coating all these goodies with a bit of flour will keep them from sinking to the cake.

Finally, mix the batter with the carrot mixture and bake it in two nine-inch cake pans. While it’s in the oven, mix together your frosting by combining mascarpone cheese, cream cheese, confectioners’ sugar, heavy cream, vanilla extract, and some more minced crystalized ginger.

When the cakes have baked and cooled, frost the middle and the top with your cream cheese frosting, and you’re ready to celebrate. Grab the full recipe here and bring carrot cake back into the mainstream.

Before you go, check out the gallery below: