Carrot Coffee Cake Recipe

Best EASY Coffee Cake Recipe

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you’ll know that my husband doesn’t eat much of my desserts. But – this coffee cake is one of the recipes that Mel DOES eat…which means it gets 5 gold stars.

People tend to think of carrot cake as just a spring thing, but really, this coffee cake is so good you should make it all year long! It’s a from-scratch coffee cake recipe with a streusel topping and just happens to be full of carrots and carrot cake spices.

The coffee cake base is my mom’s famous coffee cake recipe – famous in our family, that is – and we’ve been making it my ENTIRE life – and longer.

Mom’s recipes are always best – especially this coffee cake (and her snowballs aren’t bad either).

Why we love this recipe

Even though I’ve never posted my mom’s official recipe, I’ve made several coffee cake recipes here on the blog, and all of them are adapted from her base recipe. I think, besides this one, the peanut butter coffee cake is my favorite. (For obvious reasons. #crazyforpeanutbutter)

This is a two bowl recipe but you don’t need a mixer. And the second bowl is used to make the crumble topping. I mean…that’s necessary right? You can’t have coffee cake without crumble topping.

The cake is filled with the flavor of carrot cake. The carrots give the proper texture and the cinnamon adds that telltale carrot cake flavor. You can add nuts to your streusel topping, and if you’re so inclined, throw some raisins in the cake. (But we can’t be friends if you do that. #TotallyKidding #notaraisinfan)

Coffee Cake Ingredients

• Vegetable Oil – you can use melted butter if you prefer, but I like how oil keeps cakes moist.
• Cinnamon – required for carrot cake!
• Flour – Use all-purpose flour
• Milk – You can use any kind of milk or nondairy milk.
• Shredded Carrots – shred your own carrots for best results! Pre-shredded carrots are too stiff and won’t soften properly.

How to make Streusel

It wouldn’t be coffee cake with out some sort of crumble streusel topping!

Again, mom’s recipe is a winner, because this is such an easy topping you just mix together with a fork. Then spread it on top the batter in the pan and then bake the cake until a toothpick comes out clean.

• Melted butter – a must!
• Brown sugar
• Flour
• Cinnamon
• Chopped Nuts – We LOVE using chopped nuts in coffee cake. Use walnuts or pecans (walnuts are traditional I think, for carrot cake, but I love pecans too)!