I Was Rooting For You

Carrot Cake Bars Review -

QUICK FACTS:

Found on: Pinterest; Two Sisters blog

Link: http://www.twosisterscrafting.com/carrot-cake-bars/

I love me some carrot cake. I can remember it being such a treat to go down to the local coffee shop with my dad and share a slice of their carrot cake while he drank his fancy coffee, so carrot cake holds a special place in my heart. So, when I saw this recipe around the time when I was looking for Easter recipes to test, I was sold: carrot cake in bar form? Genius. They looked cute, the recipe looked straight-forward and they were apparently delicious and taste just like carrot cake – of course I was going to try them! It took me a couple weeks but I finally got around to it on one of those awful rainy days we were having last week.

Now, I was super well-behaved with this recipe: I followed it exactly, with the exception of the icing. There I cut the sugar in half, which honestly I do with basically every icing recipe I’ve ever come across: I have a sweet tooth but there’s a point where it’s even too sweet for me! Apparently this recipe is based on one of Two Sisters’ most popular recipes: Carrot Cake Cookies, so that raised the expectations for me that little bit more.

RECIPE:

Ingredients

For the bars:

1 cup butter (salted)

1 cup white sugar

½ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

3 cups all-purpose flour

4 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

2 cups grated or raw carrots

For the icing:

8oz package of cream cheese

½ cup butter

2 tsp vanilla

4 cup icing sugar (I only used 2 cups)

Instructions

Shred/grate and chop the raw carrots. (I found that two average sized carrots gave me two cups.)

In a large bowl, with a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar.

Beat in the eggs and vanilla.

Add the cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt and mix well.

Add flour and mix til combined.

Add the carrots and mix til just combined, like you would adding chocolate chips to a cookie dough.

Press the dough down on a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper or aluminum foil until evenly distributed.

Bake at 375 for 14 mins or til golden brown.

Let cool. While cooling, make the icing:

Soften the butter in the microwave if you forgot to leave it out ahead of time like I always do.

Add the softened butter, cream cheese and vanilla to a large mixing bowl and beat til fluffy.

Add icing sugar, slowly start to mix and increase the speed when the danger of getting covered head to toe with icing sugar has passed. Alternatively, Two Sisters recommends wrapping your stand mixer in a clean dishtowel to prevent this from happening.

Frost cooled sheet of bars with a spatula.

Two Sisters also has instructions on making a cute carrot decoration out of candy melts, I don’t usually have the patience to do that but if you do definitely check out their site!

Listen, I really wanted these to be delicious. I really really did. But all I could think of when I ate my first one was that I should have made changes to the recipe. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good. But they’re definitely not great… Especially when I consider the amount of work that goes into just shredding the carrots. Admittedly I may have gone a bit overboard trying to make sure that they were all basically identical pieces, but even so, it was quite a bit of work for something that ended up being underwhelming! Another issue was that it doesn’t feel like there’s enough carrot – maybe I like my carrot cake to be more carrot and less cake than most people, but to me, a stellar carrot cake is has a pretty much even ratio of carrot to cake. This felt more like cake with carrot than carrot cake, and that’s not what you want!

When my mom tasted them she asked me if I’d mixed up the baking powder and baking soda, and that’s not the first question every baker dreams of being asked, because if you have? They probably taste a bit off. In this case, I didn’t accidentally use baking soda instead of baking powder, the recipe called for both but it still ended up tasting like I had made a mistake? Not good.

All in all, like I said these didn’t taste awful but as my mom put it “I wouldn’t make them again, but I’ll eat them.” Again, not exactly a ringing endorsement. The batch makes a ton of squares, which normally I’d say was a bonus but in this case… I actually ended up tossing the couple extras that wouldn’t fit in the (four) large Tupperware containers I was storing them in, and I’m pretty much always game to eat the extras!

Will I ever make this recipe again? Probably not. Great concept, meh results. I may try the original recipe that these were based off of, the Carrot Cake C

ookies, but the results from this first one don’t give me a ton of confidence that it would turn out any better.

That being said, if I were to make these again, it would be with the following changes:

3-4 cups of carrots (and I am totally buying pre-shredded without shame)

Get rid of the baking soda, leaving just 1 tsp of baking powder.

Cut the extra salt.

For the icing, cut the sugar even more to 1 ½ cups.

Will those changes save the recipe? I don’t know, but if I do test it out, I’ll definitely keep you babes in the loops!