Carrot cake whoopie pies are soft, cake-like sandwich cookies filled with cream cheese frosting. The cookies are made with shredded carrots, pecans, and cozy spices and turn out perfectly tender and moist.
Recipe summary
Flavor: Like your favorite carrot cake. Made with shredded carrots, pecans, and cozy spices. Filled with tangy cream cheese frosting.
Texture: Soft, tender, cakey.
Yield: 15 sandwich cookies.
It's quick. No chilling required, so you can have a batch ready in less than an hour!
Similar to: Whoopie Pies
More carrot cake: Carrot Cake Cookies and Carrot Cake Cupcakes
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Cookie ingredients
- Unsalted butter - The butter and salt listed in the recipe can be substituted with salted butter if needed. It's important that your butter is room temperature, not melted or cold. Melted butter can cause your dough to turn out thin and runny.
- Sugars - We're using a combination of granulated sugar and brown sugar in this recipe for optimal texture and flavor. Granulated sugar aerates the butter when creaming the two together, which helps lift your cookies as they bake. Brown sugar adds a caramelized, molasses flavor and chewy texture to your cookies.
- Egg - Room temperature eggs incorporates seamlessly into the dough and add moisture and structure.
- Vanilla extract - Enhances the flavor of your cookies.
- All-purpose flour - Adds structure to your cookies and balances with the wet ingredients in the recipe. I haven't tested this recipe with other types of flours, so I can't say for sure how your cookies would turn out with substitutions. To avoid wasting ingredients, I highly suggest searching for a recipe that has been developed with the type of flour you'd like to use.
- Leavening - You'll need baking soda for the proper lift in this recipe. It cannot be substituted with baking powder, the two are not interchangeable.
- Salt - Enhances the flavor of your cookies and balances the sweetness without making your cookies "salty".
- Spices - Cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg add a warm, cozy spice flavor to these cookies.
- Carrots - Shredded carrots add a slightly sweet flavor to your cookies, as well as added moisture and structure. I don't recommend omitting them from the recipe because other ingredients have been reduced to account for the addition of carrot. A finely grated carrot blends in seamlessly when baked, and a larger grate adds more texture to your cookies.
- Pecans - Can be substituted with chopped walnuts, toasted shredded coconut, or even white chocolate chips.
Frosting ingredients
- Cream cheese - It's very important to use the correct type of cream cheese for this recipe. You'll need block-style full fat original cream cheese. Low-fat cream cheese or spreadable cream cheese in a tub will not work for this recipe. Using whipped or spreadable cream cheese will result in a runny frosting.
- Butter - I only recommend making this recipe with a half stick of real butter, not margarine or vegetable oil spread (commonly found in a tub). I recommend unsalted butter so that you can control the amount of salt in your buttercream, but salted butter can be substituted (and the listed salt omitted) if desired.
- Confectioner's sugar - Sometimes called powdered sugar or icing sugar. Confectioner's sugar sweetens and stabilizes the frosting, making it thick and pipeable. I don't recommend blending granulated sugar to make confectioner's sugar because you often can't achieve the superfine texture of manufactured confectioner's sugar at home.
- Vanilla extract - Adds flavor to the frosting.
- Salt - Balances the sweetness of the frosting.
How to make carrot cake whoopie pies
- Add butter and sugars to a large bowl and use a hand mixer to beat until creamed and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until fluffy. In a separate bowl, whisk together dry ingredients.
- Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix to combine. Last, add carrots and pecans and stir to incorporate.
- Use a medium cookie scoop to portion dough out onto a parchment lined baking sheet.
- Bake until tops look set and cookies are browning around the edges.
- Allow cookies to cool on the sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.
- Flip half of your cookies over, add frosting, and top with remaining cookies to create sandwiches.
Heather's Top Tip
For accurate results every time, use a kitchen scale to measure flour by weight. If you don't have a kitchen scale, use the spoon and level method. Stir the flour (especially if it's been packed down in a bag/container), then gently spoon into the measuring cup, leveling off the top with a knife. Scooping with a measuring cup compacts flour into the cup and adds up to 25% extra to the recipe, resulting in dry, bland cookies that don't spread properly.
Tips and tricks
Grating carrots - I used the smaller side of a simple box grater to grate my carrots. A food processor with a grating disc can also make quick work of vegetable grating but requires extra cleanup. Finely grated carrot incorporates seamlessly into the dough and doesn't add an obvious texture the way a coarse grate would.
Room temperature ingredients - Using room temperature ingredients makes a consistent, creamy, and even dough. When beaten, the sugar and butter form an emulsion which traps air in the dough, baking up into a soft and fluffy cookie.
Properly measure your flour - This is the most common issue I see in baking. By scooping directly from a bin or bag with a measuring cup, this compacts the flour into the cup, adding up to 25% extra flour to the recipe. Instead, I highly recommend using a kitchen scale. If you don't have a scale, use the spoon and level method. Stir your flour with a spoon, then gently spoon the flour into your measuring cup. Level off the top with a knife.
Making perfectly sized cookies - I recommend using a medium OXO cookie scoop to measure dough out into perfectly sized cookies. This is arguably more important for whoopie pies, since we're pairing the cookies together to make sandwiches.
Use parchment paper - This helps prevent your cookies from spreading too much while baking. A greased baking pan guarantees your cookies spread more than they should, so I always suggest parchment paper (or a reusable baking mat) instead.
Storage
Homemade whoopie pies will keep for 3 to 4 days in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator. To help keep your cookies soft, add a slice of bread to the cookie container and replace as it gets stale.
Bring cookies to room temperature for 30 minutes before serving.
Cookies can also be frozen for up to 3 months. Place on the countertop uncovered for 60 minutes to thaw.
Frequently asked questions
This recipe is written using a cream cheese buttercream frosting as the filling. However, regular buttercream frosting or even marshmallow fluff could be used as whoopie pie filling.
Dry baked goods can happen for several reasons. If any of the moisture-adding ingredients have been reduced, like sugar, butter, eggs, and carrots, this can cause your cookies to turn out dry. If too much flour was added (I recommend weighing your flour or using the spoon and level method), cookies can turn out dry. Lastly, baking too long in the oven can dry out baked goods.
This can happen when your dough is too warm or the baking sheet was greased instead of lined with parchment.
- You may have accidentally added too much butter to the recipe or used melted butter instead of room temperature butter. If your cookie dough is very thin, you could try baking your dough in a 9x13 pan instead of individual cookies. If too much butter was added, your cookies may also turn out quite greasy.
- Try refrigerating the entire baking sheet (and cookies dough) for 10 minutes before baking your cookies.
- Use parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. I do not recommend using a greased cookie sheet. A layer of grease or cooking spray makes cookies of any kind spread more than they should in the oven.
Recommended
📖 Recipe
Carrot Cake Whoopie Pies
Ingredients
Cookies
- ½ cup (113 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
- ½ cup (107 g) brown sugar
- ½ cup (100 g) granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs, room temperature
- 2 cups (240 g) all-purpose flour
- 1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- ½ teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 ½ cups (150 g) grated carrots
- ½ cup (57 g) chopped pecans, or walnuts
Frosting
- 2.5 ounces block-style cream cheese, room temperature
- ¼ cup (56 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
- 2 cups (227 g) confectioner's sugar
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- ⅛ teaspoon salt
Instructions
Cookies
- Preheat oven to 350℉ and line a baking sheet with parchment paper (do not grease your baking sheet, this can cause cookies to spread into blobs). Set aside.
- In a large bowl add butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar. Using a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat until light and fluffy, about a minute. Add eggs and vanilla extract and beat until light and fluffy about 1 to 2 minutes.
- In a separate bowl, add flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Sift or whisk to remove clumps.
- Gradually stir dry ingredients into butter mixture until just combined. Add grated carrots and pecans to dough and stir until evenly incorporated
- Using a 1.5 tablespoon cookie scoop, drop cookie dough 2 inches apart onto your prepared baking sheet. Recipe should make 30 individual cookies total.
- Bake for about 9-11 minutes, or until lightly browned around edges. Allow to cool for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.
Frosting
- In a large bowl, add cream cheese and butter. Using a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat until smooth and creamy. Add vanilla, salt, and half off the confectioner's sugar, mixing slowly to combine. Add remaining confectioner's sugar and mix slowly to combine. Once incorporated, beat on high speed for 2 to 3 minutes, until light and fluffy.
- Pipe or spread frosting onto half of the cookies. Top with remaining cookies to make sandwiches.
Equipment Recommendations
Notes
- Storage: Cookies will keep for 3-4 days in a sealed container. To help keep cookies fresh, place a slice of bread in the container with the cookies. Replace the bread slice as needed.
- Frosting options: Cream cheese frosting can be substituted with a half batch of whipped buttercream frosting if desired.
- Types of cream cheese: Block cream cheese must be used to make your frosting. Cream cheese in a tub or whipped cream cheese will result in a runny frosting.
- More tips: Be sure to check out my 10 tips for baking cookies, based on reader comments and questions!
Loved them!!
Followed to a T - weighed the flour properly as well - and all baked into each other like flat sploches. The cakes were greasy and too much ginger.
Hi Sam, I'm sorry to hear that your cookies didn't turn out! I'd love to try and help figure out what happened.
Did you use a greased baking sheet instead of a parchment lined baking sheet? This will cause cookies to spread more as well as make them greasier. This recipe uses half the normal amount of butter due to the addition of carrots, so that's surprising that they turned out greasy. Did the cookie dough look like it does in the photos above before baking, or did it look thin once you added a particular ingredient? If you have any remaining dough, you can try refrigerating it, or freezing your prepared cookie sheet for about 10 minutes before baking. Cold dough will spread less in the oven.