Sourdough Carrot Cake Scones

These Sourdough Carrot Cake Scones are everything you love about carrot cake—spiced, moist, and studded with sweet raisins, crunchy pecans, and plenty of shredded carrots—all wrapped up in a buttery, tender scone.

Sourdough discard helps tenderize the scones, and they’re complemented with lots of cozy add-ins like shredded carrots, raisins, pecans, and spices to mimic carrot cake. They’re not too sweet and are great for Easter weekend, spring breakfast, or afternoon treat with coffee or tea.

The recipe includes lots of instructional tips and images so you get moist, tender, and flaky sourdough carrot scones every time!

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⭐️ Why You’ll Love this Recipe

• Sourdough discard tenderizes scones, just like in Sourdough Pie Crust.
• Freshly grated carrots add natural sweetness and moisture, akin to Sourdough Banana Bread or Sourdough Zucchini Bread.
• Spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and turmeric for color and warmth.
• Tangy cream cheese glaze.
• Crunchy nuts like pecans or walnuts and plump, sweet raisins with lots of substitutions and variations.
• Can easily make ahead and freeze before baking.

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🔍 Tips for Making Sourdough Carrot Cake Scones

• Don’t overmix the batter
  • Too much mixing leads to gluten development. It’s something you want in a sourdough bread recipe, but it will result in tougher scones if you mix the dough too much. This is the same idea as overmixing sourdough chocolate chip cookies, cheddar sourdough biscuits, or Sourdough Blueberry Yogurt Muffins.
• Chill scones before baking
  • Freezing the scones for at least 30 minutes before baking will make them flakier as the butter releases steam in the hot oven.
• Stack the dough to create flaky layers
  • To make flaky biscuits or scones, I stack (or laminate) the dough a couple of times to make more layers. This is a similar technique to making Flaky Sourdough Biscuits or lamination in Sourdough Croissants.
• Use freshly grated carrots
  • Pre-shredded carrots can be dry. Freshly grating the carrots will lend more moisture and a better texture that will melt in your mouth.
• Bake at a high temperature
  • Like baking other pastries or breads that you want to rise tall such as sourdough brioche or sourdough chocolate muffins, bake the scones at 400ºF (204ºC) so they will release a lot of steam and quickly rise from the blast of heat.

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🛠 Tools Needed:

You only need a few basic tools to make these sourdough discard carrot scones. No mixer required!

• Baking scale: Since the density of flour and sourdough starter may vary among individuals, it’s recommended to weigh your ingredients for accuracy. Weighing your ingredients by weight will make your baking more consistent and accurate.
• Whisk: For mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately.
• Bench Scraper: Helps shape and cut out the scones.
• Baking sheet: I bake the scones on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

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🛒 Ingredients Needed:

See below for my ingredient recommendations and possible substitutions.

• Carrots: Freshly grate carrots for the best flavor and moisture. You could also use them in my Sourdough Zucchini Muffins.
• All-purpose flour: For tender scones, use a softer wheat flour, such as all-purpose flour or cake flour. I use King Arthur all-purpose flour.
• Baking Powder
• Salt
• Spices: I use cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger for the warm spices and add turmeric for natural orange color. However, you can add more or substitute with other spices like cardamom, allspice, or clove if you want.
• Light brown sugar: These scones aren’t too sweet since carrots and raisins have natural sweetness, but the brown sugar lends some moisture from molasses too. You can substitute with coconut sugar if you’d like.
• Raisins: I like golden raisins, but you can use regular ones or currants too. Can leave out or substitute with another dried fruit if you like. Other favorite sourdough recipes with raisins or currants include my Sourdough Irish Soda Bread, Sourdough Bran Muffins, Sourdough Cinnamon Raisin English Muffins, and my Sourdough Cinnamon Raisin Bread.
• Pecans: Toast nuts for the best flavor. Can substitute with walnuts, pistachios, or almonds.
• Unsalted butter: Use grated, frozen butter for this recipe. Cold butter prevents gluten development, resulting in flakier scones and helps them rise taller.
• Egg: The egg helps bind the ingredients and adds a bit more structure.
• Heavy Cream: Heavy cream (or whipping cream) gives the best flavor to these scones. If you use milk, use whole milk so you have more fat in the recipe.
• Sourdough Discard: If you don’t have an active sourdough starter, learn how to make one in a week following my how-to guide. See my top sourdough starter tips here.
• Vanilla Extract
• Coarse or raw sugar for topping (optional): Adds some sparkle, a little more sweetness, and crunchiness to the top of the scones.

Cream Cheese Glaze

Carrot cake is usually made with a cream cheese frosting, so I make an easy cream cheese glaze for these scones.

• Cream cheese: Let the cream cheese soften to room temperature before mixing.
• Powdered Sugar: The very fine confectioner’s sugar dissolves quickly and easily for glazes like the glaze for my Sourdough Lemon Poppy Seed Bundt Cake or my Brown Butter Sourdough Hot Cross Buns.
• Heavy Cream: Can use whole milk or a thick plant-based milk. I typically use 2-3 TBS for this recipe, but eye it as needed.

You could also use the cream cheese glaze from other favorite sourdough recipes with cream cheese including: Sourdough Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls with Chai Cream Cheese Frosting, Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls with Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting, or Sourdough Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins.

Variations

• Chocolate: Add ½ cup of chocolate chips or chopped chocolate to the batter.
• Pineapple: Add ½ cup of crushed and drained canned pineapple or freshly chopped pineapple. Will likely need to increase the amount of flour slightly.
• Coconut: Add ½ cup of shredded unsweetened coconut and make a coconut glaze with coconut cream on top!
• Orange zest: For more brightness, add orange zest to the dough.
• Maple syrup: Make a maple syrup glaze or frosting, like in my Sourdough Pumpkin Whoopie Pies. You could also substitute the brown sugar out with 55g of maple syrup in the wet ingredients. Decrease the heavy cream in the recipe.

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🥕 How to Make Sourdough Carrot Cake Scones

Follow this visual and detailed recipe guide as you make these sourdough carrot scones.

1. Mix the Dry Ingredients

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

Add the all-purpose flour, salt, baking powder, spices, and light brown sugar to a large mixing bowl and whisk together.

Grate carrots and add to the bowl with raisins. Toast pecans in a small skillet, cool, chop. Mix all of the dry ingredients together.

2. Mix the Wet Ingredients

In a liquid measuring cup or other mixing bowl, whisk the heavy cream, egg, sourdough discard, and vanilla extract.

3. Grate the Frozen Butter

Grate the frozen butter directly into the bowl of dry ingredients and toss.

4. Mix the Scone Dough

Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and use a fork or hand to gently toss the dough.

The scone dough will be quite scraggly and dry at first, but as you continue to mix and shape the scones, it will become more wet.

Toss the dough in the bowl until large clumps form, but there are still some floury spots remaining.

5. Shape and Freeze the Scones

Dump the scone dough out onto a clean countertop (Image 1). It’ll still be scraggly and a little floury like making pie dough.

Using a bench scraper, bring the dough together into a mass as much as you can (2).

Cut the dough into quarters (3) and stack them on top of each other (4). This will help create many flaky layers!

Use floured hands or your bench scraper to press down on the layers of dough back into a round mass. Repeat the cutting, stacking, and pressing down one more time and pat it down into an 8-inch round, about 1 ½ inches high.

Then, use your bench scraper to cut the scones into 8 wedges. To cut, I press straight down and first cut into four quadrants (90º angles at a cross-section), followed by 45º slices to slice the quadrants in half.

Place your scones on the prepared baking sheet and place in the freezer for at least 15 minutes while you preheat the oven.

Freezing the scones will help them retain their triangle shapes, be flakier, and rise taller.

6. Bake

As the scones freeze, preheat the oven to 400ºF (204ºC).

When ready to bake, brush the tops of the scones with a couple tablespoons of heavy cream and sprinkle raw sugar on top of the scones for sparkle and crunch.

Bake for 23-25 minutes, or until the scones are dark golden brown.

Cool on a wire baking sheet as you make the cream cheese glaze.

7. Make the Cream Cheese Glaze

This cream cheese glaze is so easy to make!

Add powdered sugar and softened cream cheese to a bowl and mix. Then, slowly drizzle in heavy cream and stir until you have a thick consistency. If the glaze is too thick, add a little more cream. If runny, add more powdered sugar.

Use a spoon to drizzle the glaze on top of the cooled scones and a small sprinkle of grated carrots and chopped pecans.

Finally, enjoy!

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How to Store

Sourdough scones are best served the day they’re baked. If you can wait to drizzle them with the glaze, they’ll last a little longer if you know you won’t consume them all in one sitting.

Keep the scones in an airtight container at room temperature for a couple of days.

You can store them in the refrigerator too, if you’d prefer to get an another couple of days out of them. Reheat before serving.

I don’t recommend freezing already baked scones, but you can easily freeze them months in advance before baking as I note in the instructions above.

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❓ FAQs:

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