Cupcakes are really just tiny cakes, so if you’re scouring the internet for carrot cupcake recipes you can close your laptop. Every carrot cake recipe can be a carrot cupcake recipe as long as you time the bake properly. The difference between a full-sized carrot cake and cupcakes isn’t in the batter itself, it’s in the shape of the pan. Muffin tins, which are used to make cupcakes, have a lot more surface area than regular cake pans — that is, more of the cake batter touches metal than in a regular cake. The shape of the pan creates the distinctive shape of cupcakes, but all that metal also heats up each little portion of batter quickly by distributing heat on all sides of the cupcake and speeds up the baking process. Not only that, each cupcake contains only around ¼ of a cup of batter, which takes much less time to bake than a whole cake.
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If you want to turn your grandmother’s recipe for carrot cake into cupcakes, it’s easy. Just shave about half of the time it takes to bake the whole cake or cake layers, which is normally around 30-45 minutes. It’s extra important to rotate your cupcake pan in the oven about 2/3rds of the way through the bake time, in case your oven has hot spots. Don’t rotate them too soon, though, because the cake crumb needs time to rise and set.