A soft, fluffy, delicious, and single serving carrot cake in a mug recipe. It’s the perfect easy dessert for Easter, or for any other day too!
Raise your hand if you like carrot cake.
Jump up and down if you’d like a single-serving carrot cake in a mug that takes less than 5 minutes to make and is so healthy you can eat the entire recipe in one sitting.
Yes, you really can.
Of course you’ll want frosting.
I used the frosting written out in my recipe for Keto Carrot Cake.
Carrot cake and frosting are meant for each other.
Alternatively, you can use vanilla frosting, Coconut Whipped Cream, almond butter, Vegan Cream Cheese, or whatever your carrot-loving heart desires.
It should be no surprise to you that my own carrot-loving heart often desires coconut butter. Slice the cake – or cakes – in half and slather on the frosting.
Oh, um, and you can stop jumping up and down now.
People at work will start to think you’re crazy…
A single serving carrot cake recipe that can be made in your oven or microwave and is secretly good for you. It can’t get much better than that!
Also try this chocolate Brownie in a Mug
Carrot Cake In A Mug
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup spelt, white, or gf all purpose flour (or here's a Keto Mug Cake)
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/8 tsp each: baking soda and salt
- 1 1/2 tbsp sugar (unrefined or xylitol if desired)
- pinch uncut stevia, or 1 additional tbsp sugar
- 1/3 cup canned carrots, drained (or steamed carrots, peeled)
- 1 tbsp milk of choice
- 1 tbsp oil or almond butter, or additional milk of choice
- 1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
Instructions
- Carrot Mug Cake Recipe: In a small bowl, mix dry ingredients (not carrots). If you have a blender or Magic Bullet, mix all wet ingredients and blend. (For those without a blender, simply fork-mash the carrots very well before combining with the other wet ingredients.) Then mix dry into wet, and stir. Pour into greased ramekins or a little dish or mug. (I used two 1/2-cup ramekins.) If using the microwave, cook for 1 minute 20 seconds (or more or less, depending on the strength of your microwave). Or you can cook this in the oven at 350F for around 15 minutes. Let cool before trying to pop out. Serves 1-2. Frosting recommendations are listed above in this post.View Nutrition Facts
Notes
Reader Favorite Recipes:
Can’t wait to try this!
I hope yesterdays weather didn’t directly affect you! I saw it on the news and it was awful!! We didn’t even get that much rain in Austin.
It was really scary. Unfortunately a lot of my friends lost car and/or house windows. I feel really lucky that all I got was a giant mess of leaves in my front yard.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen my poor dog shake so much :(.
What a timely recipe. First of all, I was already raising my hand when I clicked on your post (the sun was in my eyes and I raised my hand to block it-haha!) and second, I bought a piece of carrot cake at the natural foods market today and it was S-T-A-L-E. Of course, I don’t have any canned carrots, but this stroke of genius has me very excited because the only reason I haven’t made my own carrot cake is that I detest shredding carrots.
I am right there with you! Actually, I think I hate peeling them the most. Such a hassle for lazy girls like me who want their cake right away! 😉
Don’t peel the carrots… The skin is where SO many of the vitamins and minerals are… You just scrub the dirt off. Same with potatoes and other things like that. You want to clean them, but you want the skin on it…
Mashed potatoes, we just do completely wrong in most cases. Most people peel the potatoe, throw the skins away, boil the potatoes, dump the water and eat the inside. If anything, we should be drinking the water (infused with vitamins and minerals) and dumping the inside of the potatoes, lol. 🙂
For boiling carrots, you only want to use a little water so you can use that water in the recipe and keep all the minerals and vitamins.
Hey! Every time a dessert craving kicks in, I always make something from your blog. Usually the cookie ball pops (my husband LOVES them too!!). He loves carrot cake, so he will most likely like this recipe.
I think the next thing I’m gonna try is your cake batter donuts with your hot chocolate butter as a frosting!!! YUM
Aw that really makes me happy… I hope he likes the cake too!
Can you recheck the Nutritional Info (particularly the fat grams) on this one? The recipe calls for 1T of “oil of choice” – most oil you would use for a recipe like this (peanut, safflower, …) is ~13g of fat per T, yet your nutritional content has only 0.5g of fat in a half-recipe. Something seems off there….
Love all the creative ideas you publish – great blog!
Dave, read some of the other comments. Her nutritional info is correct, and she’s answered your question about a thousand times already!
Hi Dave,
As I told the other reader, the calculations aren’t off: From what I’ve seen in cookbooks, it’s standard practice when calculating nutritional info to use the lower of the two items if two are given (such as with the oil and milk). This cake is perfectly delicious regardless of which option you choose to use.
Sorry for the confusion!
This was insanely delicious! I actuallydoubled the recipe, added fresh pineapple chunks and blended with the steamed carrots, added a little applesauce, omitted any artificial sweetener and added raisins. Baked in the oven in aramekins, took more like 25 minutes vs. 10-12. So sweet and moist it probably doesn’t even need the brown sugar. Amazing, thank you Katie!
I love your idea to add the pineapple. I definitely want to try that next time :).
This is my first CCK recipe I ever tried, and now I’m hooked! I had my doubts (It’s fat free? Can’t be good!) But oh wow oh wow was I wrong!
If anyone else is reading this and has doubts, DON’T! This recipe rocked my socks off!
I joined the “made it” club tonight….4 times!! This is good stuff and I didn’t even use frosting
I don’t have kids of my own (yet), but I bet if you made a big batch of batter at a kid’s birthday, you could have each kid spoon some batter in a small mug to “bake” their own cake in the microwave. This would’ve been awesome to have as a kid!
That is such a ridiculously-cute idea!! Bookmarking! 🙂
Katie, I love your single serving recipes!
But I notice they often, especially the ones involving pumpkin/applesauce/puree/tofu/etc, don’t RISE for me. They end up like (admittedly delicious) flourless cakes or brownies in consistency. Looking at your pictures, it seems they rise and get “cakey” just fine for you. I dunno what I’m doing wrong T_T I want carrot cake that’s more than half an inch tall so I can slice it and have a middle icing layer.
Anyone have any tips? They’d be greatly appreciated.
Hmmm… what flour do you use? Can you give me more specifics… and what specific recipes?
I tried using a mix of BRM baking mix and soba flour for this carrot cake, and I used about half of a BRM Egg Replacer “egg.” It seems to happen most often in the recipes that utilize a large amount of “wet” ingredients like veggie puree or tofu. There’s a recipe on here somewhere for a vanilla cake that uses tofu, which did the same thing when I tried it. The thing is, they do rise in the oven or microwave, but then they collapse back down, no matter how long I have them in there for =/ I should note it didn’t happen when I tried to make your banana bread recipe. I use a variety of flours in general though, and it changes. Sorry, I know that’s not very helpful for narrowing it down X<
Unfortunately, I can only vouch for the results of my recipes if you use the flours specified. As you said, different flours can have an ENORMOUS impact on results :(.
Oh gosh, my mom absolutely ADORES carrot cake! THANK YOU! Since she’s diabetic, I think this is a version she actually CAN have! <3 <3 <3
Carrot cake > chocolate cake for me. I know, heresy! You can have my chocolate 😉
I’ve been reading your site for about a month now, drooling over each and over dish you post…..But I’m not a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, and I was wildly intimidated by attempting to cook with, say, tofu (I didn’t even know where to look in the grocery store). Plus I currently live in rural England (so, not so many health food stores around!) with my extremely picky “It’s not a meal if it doesn’t involve pork and chips (french fries)” partner. But he has a weakness for carrot cake, and when I saw these, I decided to give it a go. Oh my God, what a brilliant decision! I also made the better than cream cheese icing, and the entire thing was AMAZING. He requested it again tonight, even after I told him it was a) healthy, b) vegan, and c) involved tofu! I am so excited to have discovered your sight (and thank you thank you thank you for beginning to post the WW points as well! Huge help); I’m now both an avid reader AND cooker of your posts 🙂
Wow, that really makes me so happy! I think it’s my favorite thing to hear that a meat-lover liked a recipe with tofu. I once got my boyfriend to like tofu by feeding him a slice of my chocolate bar pie… he was SO in shock that he’d actually eaten tofu and thought it was good! It was really funny ;).
I literally just made this. Delicious! I doubled the recipe, made it with GF flour, pumpkin puree instead of carrots, used 1 egg, and only 1 pack of stevia and it was GREAT. I did have to bake it a little longer, maybe by about 10 minutes, but who cares. Oh, and I topped it with whipped coconut cream. I am a dessert-lover who can’t have gluten, dairy, or sugar so this blog has been a dream come true. So far I’ve tried the frosting shots, deep-dish cinnamon pie, and now this and everything has been fantastic.
I don’t have spelt in the house and don’t really want to go out and buy any kind of flour anymore. (Your Deep Dish Cookie pie recipe did that to me).
I do have brown rice flour, and also soy flour (soy flour? I don’t know why either) . Do you think either would be good?
Sorry, I really never know if a recipe substitution will work unless I’ve tried it :-?.
I just made this. It is soooooooo good ! For the egg I used an egg white, and 2% milk for the my milk of choice. I also used whole wheat flour, and canned carrots as suggested. 🙂 Thank you so much for this recipe Katie ! I will definitely be making this again when I get a hankering for carrot cake !
Wow, how cool is this? I’m a new visitor, so “Hi”. I came from FoodBuzz. My partner loves carrot cake so I’ll definitely be trying this, and might even get back to you to show how it all went! 🙂
Hi back! 🙂 🙂