How to Bake a Stately, 4-Tier-Tall Carrot Cake

The carrots keep the cake moist, the batter is lightly spiced, and the cream cheese frosting adds delicate sweetness and pleasant tang.

The only problem? It’s not much of a looker. Squat, humble carrot cake is often overshadowed by the more glamorous offerings at the dessert table. That’s because the very qualities that make carrot cake so beloved make it difficult to dress up—the dense moisture of the cake makes it sticky and prone to breaking, so even stacking two layers is a precarious undertaking, And forget trying to horizontally slice two rounds in half to create the four layers of a truly lofty cake. 

That is, until my colleague Andrea Geary developed her carrot cake recipe. She found an ingenious way to make a four-layer structure by switching up the baking pan.

While she was at it, she also devised a stiffer cream cheese frosting to act as glue to hold the layers together—and without needing to sacrifice any of the tangy flavor. 

Swathed in more frosting and embellished with toasted pecans, this is a carrot cake that deserves the spotlight.

When Andrea spotted a four-tier rectangle cake at a wholesale club made from cake layers baked in shallow jelly roll pans, it gave her an idea for what to do: 

Bake Batter in a Rimmed Baking Sheet: This offers two advantages. First, because of the shallowness of the pan, the middle of the cake sets almost as quickly as the edges, so there’s no doming and no need to trim the top to create a level surface for stacking. Second, the height of the cake is already perfect for layering, so halving horizontally is also unnecessary.

Cut Cooled Cake into Rectangles: It’s easy to cut the cake into four equal rectangles for frosting and stacking. 

Add Baking Soda to the Batter: The thinner cake bakes faster, which means the carrots don’t get a chance to fully cook through. Just a teaspoon of baking soda (the batter already contained 2 teaspoons of baking powder) raises the pH, which in turn causes the carrots to tenderize faster, so they aren’t crunchy in the cake.

Make a Stiffer Frosting: A cream cheese–heavy frosting is wonderfully rich and bright on a carrot cake—but it’s also perilously soft. In a layer cake, it can cause the layers to slip and slide. Incorporating buttermilk powder into the frosting adds enough extra tang that we could up the confectioner’s sugar for stability without muting flavor—and give the frosting even more stability.

Put Nuts on the Sides: Nuts caught on the knife when slicing the cake into layers. Instead, we took chopped pecans out of the batter and pressed them onto the sides of the frosted cake to hide imperfections and add crunch.