Who started National Carrot Cake Day?

No founder is on record. The day spreads through calendar listings, bakeries and food writing, which is how most minor American food days get about.

Is February 3 carrot cake day anywhere else?

Yes. February 3 is also Dia Nacional do Bolo de Cenoura in Brazil, where carrot cake is a fixture of home baking.

Did carrot cake really begin as a wartime substitute for sugar?

That is the story in circulation, and the printed recipes do not support it. Carrot puddings and carrot cakes were appearing in London cookbooks with substantial quantities of sugar from the 1720s onward.

National Carrot Cake Day

Next celebratedWednesday, February 3, 2027

National Carrot Cake Day sets a winter afternoon aside for the cake people keep arguing about and keep eating anyway. Bake one this evening, or order the slice with the thickest frosting and think no more about it.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEFebruary 3

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYDesserts

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

An old cake, a young frosting, and a date nobody has explained.

No founder, sponsor or establishment record for National Carrot Cake Day could be located. The February 3 date circulates through holiday listings, bakery promotion and food coverage, which is how most minor American food days spread.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

What three centuries of carrot cake recipes actually say

A London cookery book printed in 1729 gives a recipe for carrot pudding that calls for half a pound of grated carrot and half a pound of sugar. Equal weights, sugar named outright, no economising anywhere in it. The dish food writers point to as carrot cake's ancestor was a rich pudding baked over puff paste.

National Carrot Cake Day falls on February 3, and the story that comes with it reaches back to the Middle Ages, where cooks are said to have used carrots because sugar was scarce and dear. It is a good story. The printed record says something else.

The cake most Americans picture, an orange crumb under a thick white frosting, turns out to be younger than the legend around it. Its rise happened inside living memory, and it left a trail through cookbooks, newspaper food pages and a national culinary inventory.

ORIGINS

Carrot Cake Day history

CHAPTER 01

The puddings that came first

Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, sets two carrot puddings side by side. Both grate raw carrot into bread, eggs and melted butter. Both tell the cook to sweeten it to taste, and both go into a dish lined with puff paste, so what comes out sits closer to a tart than a cake.

The word cake arrives in 1824, in the London edition of Antoine Beauvilliers's The Art of French Cookery. At page 227, under the heading Carrot Cakes, Gateaux de Carottes, the Paris restaurateur works boiled carrot into a pastry cream with three quarters of a pound of sifted sugar.

CHAPTER 02

How Aargau made it a torte

Switzerland turned the same idea into a regional speciality with a name of its own. The Swiss culinary heritage inventory places one of the probably oldest printed recipes in an 1892 collection from the housekeeping school at Kaiseraugst, where the cake is called a Gelbrüblitorte.

Its proportions are startling on the page: 500 grams each of carrot, sugar and ground nuts against only 100 grams of flour, bound with eight eggs. The household textbook Gritli in der Küche carried the cake as an Aargauertorte in 1904, and by the 1917 edition the same recipe had become an Aargauer or Rüblitorte.

CHAPTER 03

How America caught up

The California newspaper record barely notices carrot cake through the first half of the twentieth century. A December 1928 advertisement in the Washington Township News Register offered it beside orange cake and gold loaf cake, and then the trail goes quiet again straight through the war years.

The change comes in the 1960s. The California Digital Newspaper Collection returns 155 matching items for carrot cake across that decade and 1,605 across the 1970s. By December 1961 a Long Beach Independent reader's recipe was already opening with one and three quarter cups of salad oil.

Who put the day itself on February 3, and when, is not on any record that could be found.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Two carrot puddings in one cookbook

Hannah Glasse prints A Carrot Pudding and A Second Carrot Pudding back to back in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, both set into a dish lined with puff paste.

The word cake finally appears

The London edition of Beauvilliers's The Art of French Cookery carries Carrot Cakes, Gateaux de Carottes, at page 227, built on a pastry cream rather than a batter.

A Swiss school writes one down

A recipe collection from the housekeeping school at Kaiseraugst in canton Aargau records a Gelbrüblitorte, which the Swiss heritage inventory counts among the probably oldest printed versions.

The Aargau name settles

The household textbook Gritli in der Küche, which had filed the cake as an Aargauertorte in 1904, now prints it as an Aargauer or Rüblitorte.

On sale at an American counter

A December advertisement in the Washington Township News Register offers carrot cake beside orange cake, gold loaf cake and square layer cake.

Salad oil and two cups of sugar

A reader's recipe printed in the Long Beach Independent opens with one and three quarter cups of salad oil, the oil based formula of the modern American cake.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Carrot Cake Day

Evidence

You do not have to believe the story. You can go and read the recipe.

Carrot cake's paper trail does not rest on anyone's say-so. The eighteenth and nineteenth century cookbooks behind it are scanned, free and word searchable, so a reader with an afternoon can go and see what the cooks actually asked for.

Recent

Younger than it looks

The frosted layer cake that reads as old fashioned on a bakery counter arrived in American kitchens inside the lifetime of people still baking it. Treating it as a survival from the Middle Ages gets the whole shape of the thing backwards.

Kitchen

A history written at home

Almost every source in carrot cake's paper trail is domestic. A housekeeping school's recipe collection, a household textbook, a reader's own recipe posted to a newspaper: this is a cake whose record was made by people cooking at home, not by chefs or by an industry.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Carrot Cake Day by the Numbers

4.74 g: Sugar in 100 g of raw carrot
88.3 g: Water in 100 g of raw carrot
14: Carrot cake items, 1950s California papers
3,119: Carrot cake items, 1980s California papers

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Carrot cake was invented in Britain during the Second World War, when sugar was rationed.

The truth

Recipes for carrot cake and carrot pudding were being printed in London more than a century before the war. What the wartime record actually documents is a Ministry of Food campaign pushing the vegetable, complete with a cartoon character called Doctor Carrot, rather than any cake.

The myth

Cream cheese frosting has always been part of carrot cake.

The truth

In the California Digital Newspaper Collection, no matching item carries both carrot cake and cream cheese frosting before 1965, while chocolate cake and cream cheese frosting share twelve matching items before 1960. When the Oakland Tribune finally ran the two in one sentence in March 1967, the writer broke off with the words and get this before describing a three layer carrot cake with cream cheese frosting surrounded by marshmallows.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Carrot Cake Day Around the World

Switzerland

The Aargauer Rüeblitorte is a bakery standard and a children's birthday favourite, held to be compact and not too sweet, finished with a sugar glaze and topped with marzipan carrots. Aargau is nicknamed Rüebliland, carrot country, and a cake of about 18 centimetres runs to roughly 20 Swiss francs.

Brazil

February 3 is also Dia Nacional do Bolo de Cenoura. The Brazilian newspaper Bem Paraná calls bolo de cenoura practically an heirloom of Brazilian home cooking, and says it is welcome at breakfast, at dessert, at afternoon coffee and as a snack.

Britain

Britain's wartime carrot push survives in the Imperial War Museums collection as a single sheet poster, catalogue number Art.IWM PST 8105. It shows a bright orange bespectacled carrot carrying a top hat and a doctor's briefcase marked Vit-A, above the line Doctor Carrot the Children's best friend.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Carrot Cake Day

You would need about ten pounds of carrot to replace half a pound of sugar

A raw carrot is roughly a twentieth sugar by weight, so matching the half pound of sugar in that 1729 pudding with carrot alone would take somewhere around ten and a half pounds of it, and drag about nine pounds of water into the bowl at the same time. The substitution the legend describes is not one a cook could actually make.

A newspaper was making the 14 carrot joke in 1965

On 21 February 1965 the National City Star-News asked its readers whether they had tried a 14 carrot cake lately, adding that it was made with fresh carrots. The carat joke was already running while carrot cake was still a minor entry in the California newspaper record.

Hannah Glasse said you could boil it

Her first carrot pudding takes an hour in the oven, or, she writes, you may boil it. If you boil it you then melt butter and put in white wine and sugar, which is a long way from a cream cheese layer.

The 1824 French version has no grated carrot in it at all

Beauvilliers wants twelve large carrots, the reddest possible, boiled in salted water, hearts removed, drained, then pushed through a colander and dried over the fire before they ever meet the pastry cream. The English recipes that came before it grate the carrot raw; only the French one boils it first.

Swiss bakers were told to sell it as health food in 1948

As Swiss rationing ended that July, the bakers' and confectioners' trade paper urged its members toward carrot baking as healthy eating, praising the vegetable as rich in vitamins and mineral salts. The country's own culinary inventory records how that went: after the shortage years, customers wanted white flour and sweet things instead.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Carrot Cake Day

Bake the 1824 French version

Beauvilliers's Gateaux de Carottes sits at page 227 of The Art of French Cookery, free to read in full. Boiled carrot, a pastry cream, whipped whites folded in at the end, three quarters of an hour in the oven.

TRY

Try it the Aargau way

Swap most of the flour for ground almonds or hazelnuts, keep the eggs high, and finish with a sugar glaze rather than frosting. The Swiss heritage entry gives the shape of it, marzipan carrots included.

TAKE

Take the 1963 advice on grating

A cook quoted in the San Bernardino Sun that November had one tip for anyone attempting a carrot cake, and it was to use an automatic grater. It remains the single best thing you can do for your knuckles.

READ

Read what a carrot pudding used to be

Hannah Glasse's two versions run one after the other in her 1747 cookbook. Reading them takes five minutes and permanently changes what you think you are eating.

BUY

Buy a slice and compare

Order carrot cake at a bakery counter, then put it next to whatever you baked. Frosting thickness, spice, nuts, raisins and crumb are all up for argument, and February 3 is the day to have that argument out loud.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Carrot Cake Day?

1 / 8

In the carrot pudding printed in E. Smith's The Compleat Housewife, how much sugar goes in against half a pound of carrot?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial food observance, the Federal Register carries no document naming it, and nobody gets the day off work.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

12sources

9primary records

5independently dated

Primary records

Internet Archive1729

E. Smith, The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion (1729)

An eighteenth century English household cookery book. Its recipe To make a Carrot Pudding calls for half a pound of carrot against half a pound of sugar, with grated bread, eggs, butter, sack and cream, baked over puff paste.

View source

Internet Archive1747

Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747)

The full text of the first edition, carrying two carrot puddings one after the other, each sweetened to taste and baked in a dish lined with puff paste, the first with a boiled alternative served in butter, white wine and sugar.

View source

Internet Archive1824

A. B. Beauvilliers, The Art of French Cookery (London, 1824)

The London edition of the Paris restaurateur's manual, held by the University of Leeds Library. Page 227 carries Carrot Cakes, Gateaux de Carottes, made from twelve boiled carrots and three quarters of a pound of sifted sugar.

View source

Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz / Patrimoine culinaire suisse

Aargauer Rüeblitorte

The Swiss national culinary heritage inventory's entry for the Aargau carrot cake, covering the 1892 Kaiseraugst recipe, the cake's naming in 1904 and 1917, the bakers' trade paper of 1948, and the modern cake's ingredients and place in Swiss life.

View source

USDA Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central2019-04-01

Carrots, raw (FDC ID 170393, SR Legacy)

The federal composition record for raw carrot, giving 4.74 grams of total sugars and 88.3 grams of water per 100 grams, of which sucrose accounts for 3.59 grams.

View source

California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California, Riverside

Search: carrot cake, 1960 to 1969

A searchable archive of California newspapers that echoes its date filter back on the results page. Matching items for carrot cake run 7 in the 1930s, 10 in the 1940s and 14 in the 1950s, then 155 in the 1960s, 1,605 in the 1970s and 3,119 in the 1980s.

View source

California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California, Riverside

Search: carrot cake and cream cheese frosting, 1965 to 1969

The same archive queried for both phrases at once. It returns three matching items, from October 1966, November 1966 and March 1967, and its no results page for every year before 1965.

View source

Imperial War Museums

Doctor Carrot, the Children's Best Friend (Art.IWM PST 8105)

The museum's catalogue record for the Second World War poster, describing a bright orange bespectacled carrot carrying a top hat and a doctor's briefcase marked Vit-A.

View source

Federal Register

Documents API search for National Carrot Cake Day

The federal government's index of rules, notices and presidential proclamations. A search for the day's name returns no documents.

View source

Additional coverage

Imperial War Museums

What You Need To Know About Rationing In The Second World War

The museum's explainer on British food rationing, recording that the Ministry of Food ran the scheme and that sugar was among the basic foodstuffs rationed directly by coupon allowance.

View source

Bem Paraná2024-02

Dia Nacional do Bolo de Cenoura: veja a origem desta delícia que praticamente todos adoram

A Brazilian newspaper report recording that Brazil marks a national carrot cake day on 3 February and describing bolo de cenoura as practically an heirloom of Brazilian home cooking.

View source

Folha de Pernambuco

Dia do Bolo de Cenoura: aprenda receita numa versão brûlée do queridinho do paladar brasileiro

A Brazilian newspaper marking the Dia Nacional do Bolo de Cenoura on 3 February with a brulee version of the recipe.

View source

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