Chocolate Sauce Gives Carrot Cake A Decadent Upgrade

Carrot cake (typically with cream cheese frosting) is easily one of the most beloved types of cake out there — despite a vegetable being a key ingredient, the cake is sweet, delicious, and fulfills the dessert craving. But there's actually a way to make the dessert even more decadent: add chocolate sauce.

Chocolate sauce and carrot cake are no strangers to one another — Brazilian carrot cake, or "bolo de cenoura" is always topped with a rich chocolate sauce instead of cream cheese frosting. Specifically, many recipes use brigadeiro frosting, which consists of the ingredients of the Brazilian dessert, brigadeiro (a chocolate confection made of chocolate, butter, and sweetened condensed milk), along with heavy cream to turn it into a sauce. The sauce is poured over the top of the finished cake to ensure that there is plenty of chocolate in each bite.

Besides the frosting, the other biggest difference is the carrots are blended up with the other ingredients for Brazilian carrot cake, while American carrot cake contains whole, shredded pieces of carrot within the cake. Even if you want to keep the shredded carrots and stick with your tried and true American carrot cake recipe, you can still add the chocolate sauce to take the dessert to the next level, making a hybrid of the two types of carrot cake.

If you love the idea of combining carrot cake and chocolate, then you may be wondering if there is a way to make the dessert even more chocolatey, beyond the brigadeiro frosting — whether or not you choose to use shredded carrots or blend them. The solution? Chocolate chips.

Add chocolate chips directly into the cake batter to make sure that each bite is full of chocolate. This is also the perfect way to use multiple types of chocolate — perhaps you use milk chocolate for the sauce and dark chocolate chips for the cake mix, or vice versa. You could even use white chocolate chips for the batter. Of course, be sure to pick up one of the best chocolate chip brands out there to ensure the dessert is as tasty as possible.

If you want to take it one step further, you can even sprinkle extra chocolate chips over the top of the chocolate sauce for one extra dose of chocolate — the mini size of chocolate chips or even small chocolate pieces would work well for this. These tips also work well for when, on another occasion, you're craving the traditional cream cheese frosting but don't want to give up the chocolate.