High Altitude Carrot Cake Sheet Cake for Easter

A moist, high altitude carrot cake sheet cake full of warm spices, frosted with the best cream cheese buttercream piped in a gorgeous floral arrangement, complete with little buttercream carrots. This pretty cake is perfect for Easter or any spring celebration. And in today’s post, you’ll also find a cake decorating tutorial for creating the piped buttercream flowers for your own Easter carrot cake.

You might also love this turquoise floral cake with piped buttercream flowers, hummingbird cake with pecan cream cheese buttercream, and textured watercolor buttercream cake.

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Why You’ll Love This Recipe

Brown Butter and Warm Spices. The brown butter adds such a nutty, rich depth of flavor to the cake, as well as makes a very moist carrot cake. And this carrot sheet cake has all the best spices, like cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. Your house will smell amazing when you bake this cake. I usually keep my carrot cake free of add ins, but I did add some chopped walnuts today, which add a lovely nutty flavor and texture.

Cream Cheese Frosting. One of the best things about carrot cake is the cream cheese frosting. And my cream cheese buttercream recipe is perfectly sweet, fluffy, full of vanilla, and very stable for piping all the beautiful details in today’s buttercream flowers design.

Perfect Easter Cake. Nothing says spring is coming like a beautiful carrot cake for Easter. Impress your friends and family with your own gorgeous creation by following the cake decorating tutorial in today’s post. You can customize your cake with any combination of colors you like, and any variety of flowers that you want to make. I love the fullness of the design, the abundance of roses, peonies, drop flowers and carrots in pretty shades of pink, yellow, orange and white, and the delicate sugar pearls and nonpareils. It’s colorful, busy, whimsical and just so fun! Another really cute idea would be to add some little butterflies or bees flitting around the buttercream flower “garden”.

High Altitude Tested. I develop all the recipes on my site for Denver’s altitude of 5,280 feet. If you’re at a lower or higher elevation, please see my FAQs for guidance on adjusting recipes for your altitude.

See the recipe card at the end of the post for the full ingredients list and instructions.

Ingredients

• Carrot Cake. Since today’s carrot cake sheet cake is based on my original carrot cake layer cake recipe, you know it’s going to be good. My carrot cake has so many 5-star ratings, and is so moist and flavorful. If you want to read about each ingredient in detail, and how they all work together in this cake, please see the original post.
• Cream Cheese Buttercream. It’s pretty much a given that carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is the best combination. Cream cheese frosting has a reputation for being harder to work with, but you can make a stable cream cheese buttercream that holds up perfectly to all the piped flowers on today’s cake. Be sure to read my post on Perfect American Buttercream for all the details on how to make stable cream cheese frosting for cake decorating.
• Sprinkles. A few sugar pearls and nonpareils add more detail and depth. I used a mix of white sugar pearls and white nonpareils, as well as the green and purple nonpareils from this Wilton Butterfly and Flower Spring Sprinkles set.
• Food Coloring. You’ll need to use gel food coloring, not liquid food coloring, so that you don’t dilute the frosting too much. I generally use the Americolor brand of gel food coloring. The colors I used for this project are Electric Pink, Super Red, Leaf Green, Electric Green, Super Black, Orange, Lemon Yellow, and Warm Brown.

Equipment

• Stand Mixer with Paddle Attachment. While the cake batter comes together with just a bowl and whisk, you need a stand mixer to make the buttercream. It’s a large batch of buttercream, and it’s just too much to try to tackle with a hand mixer. I’ve used my tilt-head Kitchen Aid mixer for going on 14 years, and it never lets me down. It’s a great investment for every baker.
• 9×13 Baking Dish. I love this Cuisinart nonstick 9×13 baking dish.
• Parchment Paper. Since this is a large cake, you must line your pan with a sheet of parchment paper. This will ensure your cake comes out of the pan cleanly without sticking when you turn it out onto a serving board or platter.
• 12-Inch Disposable Piping Bags + Couplers. You’ll need a few 12-inch piping bags, maybe 6-10, depending on how many colors you’ll be using for your buttercream. I used a total of 8 piping bags for this project.
• Piping Tips. You’ll need a variety of piping tips for decorating your carrot cake sheet cake. I used 1M, 125, 104, 352, 101, 61, and 123, all of which I believe you can find in a master piping tips set.
• Flower Nail. If you want to make flowers like roses or peonies, you’ll need to pipe them onto a flower nail, then transfer them onto your cake. Flower nails are included in the master piping tips set.
• Icing Spatula.

Instructions

Bake the Cake

• Preheat the oven to 350 F, and position a rack in the center of the oven. Line a 9×13 inch baking sheet with parchment paper, and spray the paper with non stick baking spray. Since this is a large cake, the paper will help to ensure the cake comes out cleanly, if you’ll be turning it out onto a serving board or platter to frost and decorate it.

Baker’s Note: If you plan to frost and serve your carrot cake sheet cake directly in the baking pan, then there’s no need to line it with parchment paper. Simply spray the pan with non stick baking spray or grease it with butter and flour.

• Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium low heat.  Continue cooking, swirling occasionally, until nutty brown solids form on the bottom of the pan.  Immediately scrape the butter and the browned bits into a large mixing bowl and let cool for 5 minutes.
• Add the grated carrots, applesauce, oil, milk, vinegar, granulated sugar, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla to the brown butter, and whisk until smooth.

• In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices.
• Add the dry ingredients to the wet, and whisk for 10-15 seconds until combined. If adding the walnuts, fold them in now.

• Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for about 40 minutes, until the top of the cake springs back when gently touched and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
• Set the pan on a cooling rack and cool completely, covered with a clean kitchen towel.

Make the Buttercream

• In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese, butter and shortening for 1-2 minutes until smooth.
• In a separate bowl, combine the powdered sugar, corn starch, meringue powder and salt. With the mixer on low, add the powdered sugar mixture by spoonfuls, then add the vanilla.
• Whip for 4-5 minutes on medium speed until light and fluffy, scraping the bowl down occasionally. Add a little more powdered sugar if the buttercream is too soft, or 1-2 tablespoons milk or cream if it’s too thick. Turn the speed down to “stir” and mix for 1 more minute. Keep the buttercream covered until ready to use, so the surface doesn’t crust over.

Crumb Coat the Cake

• Before decorating your cake with the piped flowers, you’ll need to prep it with a thin crumb coat of frosting.
• Flip the cake over onto a serving board or platter, and peel off the parchment paper.
• Use an icing spatula to frost the cake all over with a thin layer of the frosting. Smooth out the sides of the cake with a bench scraper. If you like, you can smooth out the top edges, too, but I like to leave a rough edge of buttercream there, sort of like a “frame” for the design inside.

Color the Buttercream

• Decide on your color palette. For my carrot cake sheet cake, I chose shades of pink, white, yellow and orange, with a small amount of green for the leaves or carrot tops. Your flowers will look the prettiest and the most realistic with various colors blended and swirled together.
• Divide your buttercream between several bowls, so you can color each separately. These are the colors that I used (the number of drops of food coloring that you’ll need will change depending on how much of the buttercream you’re coloring). The “warm brown” in the yellow and orange help to deepen and mute the color so it’s less neon and more earth toned.
  • Pale Pink: 1 drop “electric pink”
  • Medium Pink: 2-3 drops “electric pink”
  • Dark Pink: 1 drop “super red”
  • Green: a few drops each of “electric green” and “leaf green” with a tiny drop of “super black” (you only need about 1/4 cup of green buttercream, just enough for a few leaves)
  • White: nothing, unless your buttercream has a yellowish tint, you can add some “bright white” or a small drop of “violet” to neutralize the yellow
  • Yellow: 2 drops “lemon yellow” and 1 small drop “warm brown”
  • Orange: 2 drops “orange” and 1 small drop “warm brown”

Prep the Piping Bags

• Since this design uses so many different colors and different piping tips, I recommend using a “double bag” method. Basically this means you will have your buttercream in piping bags with the tips snipped off, rather than fitted with couplers or piping tips.
• Then, you’ll have two empty piping bags, one fitted with a standard sized coupler (for changing out smaller piping tips), and the other one fitted with a larger coupler, or just a larger piping tip.
• By using this method, you can drop the bags filled with buttercream into the empty bags fitted with tips, and freely move all the colors between large and small piping tips as needed.

Baker’s Note: I highly recommend reading this post: How to Use Piping Bags, Piping Tips and Couplers.

• Divide the buttercream between your piping bags. I suggest combining 2-3 colors in some of the bags, for more variation in your piped flowers.

Piping the Flowers

Using a Flower Nail

• You can pipe many of the flowers directly onto the cake, such as rosettes, drop flowers, swirls, stars and shells, and any number of other flowers using tips from your piping tips set. But for flowers that need each petal piped individually (like peonies, tulips or traditional roses) you’ll need to do these on a flower “nail”. (There are many YouTube tutorials for piping flowers – watching free tutorials is how I learn to do these.)
• You’ll need to prep the flower nail by spreading a dot of buttercream on the nail, then sticking a small square of parchment paper or wax paper onto the buttercream. Then you can pipe your flower onto the paper. When the flower is done, simply slide the paper off the nail, and place the paper with the flower on something flat, like a cutting board. Stick a new piece of paper onto the nail to pipe the next flower. When all your flowers are done, place the cutting board in the freezer for 10 minutes. Then you can use a small offset spatula to slide the cold buttercream flowers off the paper and place them on your cake.
• I started by piping a few large peonies, using my curved petal tip (121 or 123). For smaller peonies, you can use a smaller curved petal tip (61). Then I piped a few traditional roses (125 for large, 101 or 103 for small). After chilling these in the freezer, these flowers are the first ones I arranged on my cake.

Baker’s Note: Before going “live” on your cake, I ALWAYS recommend practicing new piping techniques on a piece of parchment paper first. Then, you can scrape the frosting back up to use it again. That said, if you pipe a flower onto your cake that you don’t love, it’s easy to scrape it off the top of the cake and just cover it up with something else.

Piping Flowers Directly Onto the Cake

• If you piped any flowers onto flower nails and chilled them, go ahead and arrange those on your cake first.
• Then use tip 1M to pipe large, medium and small rosettes.

• Use tip 1M to pipe some drop flowers. Don’t go too crazy with these right now – you can fill in the cake with more at the end.
• Use tip 104 to pipe some squiggly ruffles. These might look a little strange at this point, but when the cake is done, and they’re peeking through all the flowers, they look really pretty.

• Use tip 1M to pipe some shells or swoops. (At this point, I also meant to pipe some large star shapes with tip 4B or 6B, but I forgot to add them.)
• The cake should be almost full by now, so just finish filling it in with anything you like. Go nuts with more drop flowers, stars, or anything else you feel like filling in the gaps with. You can even experiment with some of those tiny little flower piping tips from your set that never get used! This is a great project for experimenting with different tips.

• Use tip 101 to pipe the carrots, keeping the wider side of the tip against the cake with the narrow side facing up.
• Use tip 352 to pipe some leaves or carrot tops. Personally, I don’t like to go overboard with too many leaves. With the flowers, I certainly felt like “more is more”, and I wanted it to be really full and busy with lots and lots of flowers. But with the leaves, I feel like less is more.

• For a final touch, place a few large sugar pearls and scatter some nonpareils. Don’t sprinkle the nonpareils everywhere – just pinch them between your fingers and strategically sprinkle them here and there to add more visual interest and depth. Your cake is done!

Recipe Variations

Smaller Sheet Cake. To do this same design but on a smaller scale, simply cut the cake recipe in half, and bake it in a 9-inch square baking dish. Cut the buttercream recipe in half.

Layer Cake. All these buttercream flowers would also be beautiful arranged on top of a layer cake. You can make the full cake recipe and bake it in three 8-inch cake pans, or half the cake recipe for three 6-inch cake pans. You may only need about 2/3 of the buttercream for an 8 inch layer cake and 1/2 the buttercream for a 6 inch layer cake.

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common questions with cake making, so that you can be successful in your own baking! I also suggest reading these comprehensive posts on making Perfect American Buttercream, How to Stack, Fill, Crumb Coat and Frost Layer Cakes and How to Use Piping Bags.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should carrot cake sheet cake be refrigerated?

Cakes with cream cheese frosting should be kept in an airtight container and refrigerated overnight. However, it’s fine to let the cake sit out to come to room temperature before serving.

Can I bake the carrot cake in advance?

You can bake the cake one day in advance, before decorating. When the cake has cooled to warm, cover the pan tightly with plastic wrap and keep at room temperature until ready to decorate.

Do I have to use the shortening in the buttercream?

The shortening helps to stabilize the cream cheese, so that the frosting isn’t too soft.  This is especially helpful in warmer climates.  If you prefer, you can use the same amount of butter to replace the shortening, but your frosting will be a little softer and less stable.

Is this a crusting buttercream?

Yes, this is a crusting cream cheese buttercream, which will dry to the touch after being applied to the cake, but stays soft underneath the surface.

Why is there corn starch in the buttercream?

A little corn starch in cream cheese frosting can help to thicken and stabilize the frosting. You need this to be a thicker buttercream, so all the piped flowers can hold their shape.

What if I don’t want to decorate the cake with the piped flowers?

This recipe makes a lot of buttercream, which you’ll need for all the piping. If you’re not planning on piping flowers, and you just want to frost your carrot cake sheet cake with a simple coat of cream cheese frosting, you should cut the buttercream recipe in half, use butter instead of shortening, and leave out the corn starch.  You could also use less powdered sugar if you want a creamier, softer, less sweet frosting.

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