Carrot Cupcakes

I've been a bit blogger fail this past week. I made challah with my son Friday and fully intended to share the experience on the blog, only to have completely spaced when it came to that all important part of taking pictures. 

I'm hoping that Friday challah baking becomes a weekly habit, so hopefully there will be multiple opportunities to make up for this past week's oversight. In the meantime, I made certain to overcompensate with lots of photos of this morning's adventures in carrot cupcakes. I took a well loved carrot cake recipe and did a little of this...and a little of that...and voila: deliciously moist carrot cupcakes.

Carrot cupcakes in a bag: We were visiting my folks, so I brought all the ingredients I needed with me!

 The recipe itself is pretty simple and straightforward. It came from a friend of my mother's and it's my go to carrot cake recipe.

Ingredients

2.5 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1.5 tsp baking soda

3 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp salt

1 3/4 cup sugar (the original recipe calls for 2 cups, but I never use that much)

1.5 cups vegetable oil

1/2 cup apple sauce

4 eggs

2 cups grated carrots (I only used that 1 large carrot and it yielded just over two cups! yay for local veg!)
8.5 oz can crushed pineapple, drained
1/2 cup raisins (I used more like 1 full cup)
1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger
(You can also add in chopped nuts, cranberries, figs, etc...this recipe is very change-it-up friendly like that!)

I mixed all the dry ingredients ahead of time at my house - easy peasy!

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour 2 trays of cupcake tins (this recipe yields 24 cupcakes) or line them with paper cups. 

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together and set aside.

In a separate mixing bowl, beat together sugar, eggs, oil and applesauce until well blended. 

Add carrots, pineapple, raisins, ginger (and whatever other "add ins" you're using). 

All from one large carrot! 

Spicy-sweet goodness. 

I didn't have crushed pineapple, so I just chopped up a can of pineapple rings. 

 Gradually add flour mixture, stirring until *just* combined. Then pour into prepared cupcake tins.

Bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out from the center clean.

 Now...you can totally eat these as is. They really are quite delicious plain, without any added frosting, but then - where's the fun in that? I decided to whip up a special maple cream cheese frosting for these.

I love that my parents still put their syrup in an old honey bear.

I went with my usual cream cheese frosting mixture of one stick softened butter mixed with one package of softened cream cheese. I add a couple of tablespoons of milk and 1 lb of powdered sugar. Instead of vanilla, however, this time I added a couple tablespoons of grade A maple syrup. The flavor complimented the carrot cupcakes perfectly.

Yum.