These carrot cake chocolate cupcakes are a step up from carrot cake & great any time of the year. With a chocolate spider web, they are perfect for Halloween.
I discovered Kitchenaid was raising money for Susan G. Komen Foundation through a Cook for the Cure program. All you had to do was bake some cupcakes during the month of October and place a picture of them on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtags #10000cupcakes, #donate and @KitchenAidUSA and they would donate $1 to help find a cure for breast cancer. What an awesome thing to do!
Since I am in the middle of #Choctoberfest I thought, why not just whip up some chocolate cupcakes for the cause. And since I seem to be on a roll of including veggies in my chocolate recipes I chose to make Carrot Cake Chocolate Cupcakes. And they came out delicious!
It is a little different than most of the recipes I found on the internet since I subbed in some applesauce, unsweetened of course, for some of the oil, but no one would notice the difference. I also added some special chocolate spider webs as a decoration that would make them great to serve as a Halloween party treat.
Two of our sponsors for Choctoberfest, Imperial Sugar and Divine Chocolate, happily provided me with plenty of sugar and delicious chocolate to create this recipe. Their products are awesome, honestly, so give their websites a look-see if you get the chance.
Try my Carrot Sheet Cake with buttermilk glaze to make it extra moist and cream cheese frosting.
Find lots of great dessert recipes here on 2CM!
CHOCOLATE CARROT CAKE CUPCAKES with CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
Ingredients
Cupcakes
- 2 cups carrots, grated
- ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
- ⅓ cup vegetable oil
- 3 eggs
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups flour
- 1-½ cups Imperial sugar
- ½ cup Divine cocoa powder
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
Cream Cheese Frosting
- ½ cup 1 stick butter, room temperature
- 4- oz Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese, room temperature
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Chocolate Decoration
- ¼ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Instructions
Cupcakes
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray muffin tin with non-stick spray.
- In a large bowl, combine grated carrots, applesauce, oil, eggs and vanilla.
- In a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Stir into carrot-applesauce mixture.
- Using a ¼ cup measuring cup, fill each muffin cup.
- Bake for 25 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center of a cupcake comes out clean.
- Let cool for 10 minutes in muffin tin on wire rack then remove cupcakes to rack to cool completely.
Frosting
- In an electric mixer, cream the cream cheese and butter. Add vanilla. Turn mixer to low speed and add in powdered sugar. Once mixed well, turn up speed and mix until creamy.
- When cupcakes are cool either frost top completely or, using a tip, pipe icing in center. Top with chocolate decoration if desired.
Chocolate Decoration
- Melt chocolate chips in microwave in 30 second increments until almost completely melted. Stir until chocolate is smooth and no pieces of chips remain.
- Place melted chocolate in either a small ziploc bag with the corner snipped or in a decorating bag with small hole tip. The OXO decorating kit works great for this!
- At this point any chocolate design can be made. I designed mine on the computer and printed it out on letter size paper so that I could easily follow a pattern. (click here for spider web pattern)
- Place the paper with designs underneath a piece of waxed paper and follow the design with your melted chocolate.
- Place in freezer until frozen and, when you are ready to serve your cupcakes, decorate the top of each one with one of the decorations.
Notes
This post has been updated and was first published on October 11, 2015.
