ROOT-ie Tootie Carrot Ginger Cupcake

Carrot-Ginger Cupcake. A root vegetable combo of goodness.

Long live the root vegetable! You so rock. Ginger is a great root. And so is the carrot - such a great color. Other fun root veggies include: The Wasabi (have you had freshly grated wasabi? So delicious, hot and spicy!), The Beet (I adore the rainbow and yellow beet), and The Potato (especially the Yam).

So, anyway, I found a recipe that has two of my favorite roots. The Carrot-Ginger Cupcake!

I made the Carrot-Ginger Cupcake from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook (page 166). The cupcakes include organic carrots and one tablespoon of freshly grated ginger.

For the frosting, I made adjustments to Dorie Greenspan's Cream Cheese Frosting. Martha's recipe for the frosting would have made sooooo much - it had 1 1/2 sticks of butter and three blocks of cream cheese...for only 24 cupcakes. I didn't want to hand out heart attacks before a hearty St. Patrick's Day dinner, so I made a smaller batch of frosting. The frosting ended up being: 1 stick of butter, 1 block 8 oz of cream cheese, 2 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, sifted, zest of one orange, and 1 teaspoon ground ginger (I just bought it at Penzy's).

The ginger with the cream cheese is really lovely! I topped them with a few pieces of orange zest. This is definitely my favorite carrot cake cupcake recipe!