Carrot Muffins

These Carrot Muffins taste just like a soft and fluffy carrot cake, but are still healthy enough to eat for breakfast.

Studded with plenty of shredded carrot, chopped pecans and raisins, these are delicious and full of warm spice flavor.

Carrot Cake Muffin recipe

One can never have too many muffin recipes, and this blog is testament to it! I have shared so many muffin recipes – from my favorite blueberry muffins to my strawberry oatmeal muffins…

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add a carrot muffin recipe to the collection. I first shared this as a very healthy recipe in 2018, but turns out not so many of you were interested in that (FYI, print the old recipe here, in case you’ve successfully made it before and are looking for it). So I re-worked it to turn it into a regular carrot muffin that is sweet, soft, nutritious and made with completely normal ingredients 😉

Ingredients you’ll need

Here is a visual overview of the ingredients in the recipe. Scroll down to the printable recipe card at the bottom of this post for quantities!

Ingredient notes

• Flour: You can replace half of the flour with whole wheat, or all of it with white whole wheat. I do not recommend using all regular whole wheat, because with the large volume of shredded carrots in the recipe, the muffins easily get too dense.
• Spices: If you don’t have all of the individual spices, only using cinnamon is also fine. If you have it, you can use pumpkin spice mix in place of the ginger and/or nutmeg.
• Carrots: Please do not use the bagged, shredded carrots. Grate fresh. The pre-shredded carrots do not have the right texture for this recipe, and they will stay stringy instead of soften during baking.
• Oil: Feel free to use melted butter in place of the vegetable oil if you want a more decadent muffin.
• Sugar: Add an extra ¼ cup of sugar for a sweeter muffin, or remove ¼ cup of sugar for a just lightly sweetened muffin. Feel free to use half light brown sugar and half granulated sugar if you want a more caramelized flavor.
• Pecans/raisins: Either can be left out, if you prefer. You will have a little less sturdy/less tall muffin, but they will still be perfectly soft and delicious.

How to make Carrot Muffins

This is a walk-through of the recipe with step photos. Skip to the printable recipe card at the bottom for exact times and temperatures.

1. Start by whisking together the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

Then, whisk together the wet ingredients in a separate large measuring jug until smooth.

2. Stir the carrots, pecans and raisins into the wet ingredients (do not use a whisk here, all of the mix-ins will just get stuck – use a rubber spatula or wooden spoon).

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3. Add the wet ingredients to the bowl with the dry ingredients and fold together just until combined.

Make sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl to catch all of the flour. Lumps are fine, but do not overmix your batter.

4. Divide the batter between 12 lined muffin cups. I use a large cookie scoop/ice cream scoop to transfer the batter, it’s so easy and mess free. Also helps with getting about equal amounts of batter into the cups!

Then just bake your muffins until done!

Recipe tips

• Measure your flour correctly: Spoon it into the cup, then level off with the back of a knife. Do not scoop the flour with the cup, this yields too much flour and your muffins will be dry and dense.
• Make sure you do not overmix the muffin batter, or your muffins will come out dense and gummy. This is especially important here because we are working with a lot of shredded carrot. Use a rubber spatula or a wooden spoon, never a whisk to combine the wet and dry ingredients for muffins. Make sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl to catch all of the flour, so you do not end up mixing too much.
• This really does bake just 12 muffins, even if the muffin cups seem very full. This is needed to get those big, nice, domed bakery-style muffins.
• Use a cookie/ice cream scoop to neatly transfer the muffin batter into the lined muffin cups. It’s the absolute easiest method for this!
• Do not overbake the muffins, or they’ll be dry. If you’re using the toothpick method to text for doneness, cake crumbs stuck to the toothpick are fine! It’s just liquid batter you want to avoid seeing on the toothpick.
• Make sure to allow the muffins to cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes before removing them to a cooling rack to cool completely. They are too soft and need to cool and firm up a little right out of the oven.

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Storage tips

Short term: Once the muffins are cooled, wrap them up in plastic wrap or place them in a storage container (do not store fully air tight, or they may develop mould pretty quickly).

Store the wrapped up muffins on the counter for up to 2 days, or in the fridge for 3-4 days.

Freezer: Wrap the cooled muffins individually in plastic wrap, then place in freezer bags or containers. Label with the name and use-by date (freeze for up to 3 months), then place in the freezer.

To defrost, remove as many muffins as you need from the bag. Allow to defrost on the counter for 15 minutes or until you can easily remove the plastic wrap. Unwrap and place the muffins on a wire rack on the counter to defrost for several hours, until no longer frozen.

PS If you try this recipe, please leave a review in the comment section and add a star rating in the recipe card – I appreciate your feedback! Follow along on Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram.

First published on 03/26/2018. Updated with a new recipe, new photos and new text on 03/30/2021. Print the old recipe here.

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