This is a moist, dense and rich carrot cake, studded with toasted walnuts and sweet coconut.

It is so delicious on its own, I didn’t want to overshadow the perfectly balanced slices with the classic cream cheese frosting. A simple dusting of powdered sugar is what it only needs.

I’ve worked very hard for this carrot cake recipe. And so did the readers of my Turkish blog. I published this recipe four months ago and baked it three more times since then, based on the feedback I’ve got from readers. It was great at the beginning and now it’s phenomenal.

Plus, it is so simple to make. You don’t even need a mixer for this. Dry ingredients into one bowl, moist ingredients in the other. Mix them, pour the batter into your pan and that’s it. You are done.

My starting point was the carrot cake recipe from Shirley O. Corriher‘s amazing book Bakewise, which I can’t seem to put down since the day I bought it. I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the chemistry behind baking fascinates me. And this book is all about that – the hows and whys of successful baking.

As for the carrot cake, I must say I’ve made significant changes to her recipe. The thing is, it was too moist and too sweet for my readers’ taste. I didn’t notice at the beginning, but baking the same cake with half the oil and sugar with a couple of tweaks to the dry ingredients proved their point.

My addition of sweetened shredded coconut provides a tropical twist and blends in nicely with the rest of the spices. So don’t skip.

Hope you like it as much as I do.