I absolutely LOVE carrot cake, and this amazing doctored cake mix recipe is moist, flavorful, and bursting with flavor!
If you love working with doctored cake mixes, don’t let this carrot cake recipe pass you by! It may start from a simple cake mix, but there are so many delicious add-ins that it’ll taste like you slaved in the kitchen for hours!
Our Carrot Cake -doctored cake mix recipe is simpler than making a carrot cake from scratch (we have an amazing scratch Carrot Cake linked below), but it’s also more involved than just mixing up a Carrot Cake mix. In fact, we don’t even use Carrot Cake mix for this recipe!
We love this doctored cake mix Carrot Cake version over simply preparing a boxed Carrot Cake mix because it has SO much more flavor from the addition of freshly shredded carrots, spices, coconut, pecans, and crushed pineapple!
We may trust the cake mix factories to create mixes for delightfully fluffy and flavorful cake layers, but there’s just no substitute for the carrots and fruit needed to make this carrot cake shine! Trust us, the payoff is worth the extra bit of work!
Now, a word about the frosting. In my book it is a crime to frost a delicious carrot cake with anything other than luscious, dreamy, cream cheese frosting. It happens to be my FAVORITE thing.
The cool and creamy tang of cream cheese frosting is the perfect complement to moist spiced carrot cake layers. We actually have two favorite Cream Cheese Frosting recipes on our site.
Our Pipeable Cream Cheese Frosting has a higher proportion of cream cheese and pipes beautifully. Our Classic Cream Cheese Buttercream Frosting is a bit softer. Both are amazing.
(*This Carrot Cake doctored mix recipe is not recommended for fondant due to the moistness that the pineapple & coconut bring to this recipe.)
Carrot Cake ~Doctored Mix Recipe
This moist and delicious Carrot Cake starts with cake mixes!
Ingredients
- 1 box spice cake mix
- 1 box white cake mix
- Follow box instructions, substituting orange juice for half of the water.
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 3/4 c. shredded coconut
- 2 1/4-2 1/2 cups carrots, grated fine
- 4 oz. crushed, drained pineapple. (We buy an 8 oz can of crushed pineapple and use about half) put in a strainer to let the excess juice drain out
- 1 cup chopped pecans.
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and prepare three 8 inch cake pans with shortening and a dusting of flour. Line pans with parchment or wax paper.
Mix cake mixes together according to box instructions. Then add remaining ingredients.
Bake at 325 degrees until cakes spring back when touched in the center.
This makes a lot of cake batter. You can bake up and freeze any extra layers, tightly wrapped, or you can half the recipe. If you half the recipe, I would use the spice cake mix rather than the white.
As I mentioned above, we also have an fantastic Carrot Cake Recipe from scratch! The add-in ingredients are similar to the the semi-homemade carrot cake version above.
We love carrots, pineapple, shredded coconut, and pecans in our carrot cakes! Such a heavenly combination of flavors and textures!! Ahhhh….
You can find our homemade Carrot Cake Recipe here: Carrot Cake Recipe from Scratch
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Thank you so much for sharing this! I made this cake last night (my 9 year old wanted to surprise his dad). Cooking is not my best talent – but I try. I know this is my own user error, lol. I followed the instructions just as written, but excluded the coconut. The cake came out kind of sticky/spongy. I did cook it about 5-10 min extra, until a toothpick came out clean. Any ideas as to what I did wrong?
Jen, did you use an off brand cake mix? Did you use all the eggs and oil from both cake mixes?? Did you drain pineapple well? These can all co tribute to your issues. Try again! You can do it!!
Does this recipe stack well? I need to make a whiskey barrel.
Hi Jackie, it’s a pretty soft cake but as long as you have supports in, you should have no problem with your barrel. I would vote for ganache frosting beneath the fondant.
Hi Jackie, Yes, it does stack well. If you are planning to do a lot of carving for your whiskey barrel, I would partially freeze the cake. Hope all goes well.
My husband *really* likes carrot cake. I don’t usually bake, for health reasons, but we had a “special occasion” meaningful to the two of us. I made the two-cake-mix version with Duncan Hines Classic White and Supermoist Spice Cake mixes. I used 2 cups of orange juice + pineapple juice + heavy cream + water in place of the two cups of half-OJ-half-water; I used melted butter in place of the oil; and, I didn’t have 8-inch round pans. (I used 3 8-inch square pans. As the two-mix recipe states, it makes a *lot* of cake batter, so the fact that each pan holds about one-quarter additional volume of batter worked. I made three tall cake layers.) I baked the cake layers until a tester came out clean, then used the freezing technique to freeze the cake layers. The cake came out *very* moist, but so tender, that they didn’t hold together all that well. I cut one layer in half and frosted the top of the first half.
When I went to stack the second half as a layer atop the first, the second layer broke in half. I glued it together with cream cheese frosting as best I could. The whole thing didn’t look as pretty as I had hoped, but the cake and the frosting tasted really, really good.
Thank you for the recipe!
Hi Carla, I think the substitutions you made must have made your cake extra tender. Cutting one of the layers in half contributed to the cake layer breaking in half. I am glad you were able to “glue” it back together. I am happy you enjoyed the cake on your special occasion. You were very creative in getting it to work for you. Thank you for trying the recipe and posting your review.