Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe
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Quick and easy cream cheese frosting brought to you by guest author Garrett McCord, the cupcake king. ~Elise
Cream cheese frosting is a baking basic. It's perfect for practically any cake and any leftovers are great dolloped onto some freshly cut fruit. This is the basic recipe, you can reduce the amount of butter if you want a bit more tang, and increase or decrease the sugar according to your taste. Dress up with ginger, vanilla bean, or coconut flakes. I've listed some of my favorite variations at the end of the recipe.
Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe
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Ingredients
- 1/2 cup of butter (1 stick), room temperature
- 8 oz of Philly cream cheese (1 package), room temperature
- 2 - 3 cups of powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
Method
1 With an electric mixer, mix the butter and cream cheese together, about 3 minutes on medium speed until very smooth. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl to ensure even mixing.
2 Add the vanilla extract and mix. Slowly add the powdered sugar. Keep adding until you get to desired sweetness.
3 Either spread on with a blunt knife or spatula, or spoon into a piping bag to decorate your cake or cupcake.
Variations:
- Adding a teaspoon of Chinese Five Spice is always great for exotic chocolate cakes.
- Adding freshly ground ginger helps spice up a carrot cake.
- Freshly ground chai spice or even the contents of a bag of earl grey tea are heady and aromatic.
- The scrapings from a vanilla bean can be very sweet and heavenly for red velvet or dark chocolate cakes.
- Freshly grated or dried, flaked coconut mixed in makes it perfect for a coconut cake.
Links:
Ginger cream cheese frosting from Heidi of 101 Cookbooks
Thai Ice tea cream cheese frosting from Cupcake Bake Shop
Bourbon caramel cream cheese frosting from Cupcake Bake Shop
Coconut cream cheese frosting from Molly of Orangette
Pumpkin cream cheese frosting from Culinary Concotions by Peabody
Garrett McCord writes for Edible Sacramento and his frosting-filled food blog Vanilla Garlic. Garrett is writing a series of sweet recipes for us here at Simply Recipes.
Do you have an interesting twist on a cream cheese frosting? If so, please let us know in the comments. ~Elise
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Posted by Garrett McCord on Feb 2, 2008 and indexed Cream Cheese, Cupcake, Frosting
OK, this is just flat-out weird.
Five minutes ago I pulled out these exact ingredients to make frosting for some carrot cake bars for tonight's Super Bowl party.
I think I need to call the bookie and up my bet on tonight's game ;-)
Kidding. Remember kids - NEVER gamble. Even on office football pools.