How to Make Cream Cheese Frosting

Cream Cheese frosting is probably my most favorite thing EVER. Whether you are adding it to Carrot Cake, Gingerbread Cake or Cinnamon Rolls, it adds that tangy sweetness that no other frosting can even touch. If you’ve wondered how to make cream cheese frosting, this post is for you. It’s really easy and you’ll find yourself putting it on EVERYTHING.

Make sure you take the time to bring all your ingredients to room temperature before you start. If your butter or cream cheese is too cold (or too hot…no melted butter!), your frosting will not come together as it should and will look “curdled” because it has bits of hard butter or cream cheese in it instead of being smooth.

You can leave your frosted cake out for up to 8 hours before it needs to be refrigerated.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

• 1 8oz package of cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 stick (or 1/2 cup) unsalted, room temp butter
• 1 pound powdered/confectioners/icing sugar
• 1 teaspoon butter vanilla emulsion
• 2 tablespoons French Vanilla coffee creamer or heavy cream

Instructions

In a mixer or a large bowl, mix the cream cheese and butter together until smooth. While you can do this by hand, an electric mixer will help you get a smoother product. Also, both the butter and cream cheese being room temperature is essential. Otherwise you’ll get lumps of one or the other in your frosting. Not pretty.

Add one cup powdered sugar into the butter/cream cheese mixture at a time and mix until smooth between each addition scraping your bowl down each time.
Add butter vanilla emulsion or clear vanilla extract and mix.

Add coffee creamer or heavy cream until your frosting is a spreadable consistency (2-3 tablespoons added one tablespoon at a time). If you add to much, pop your bowl of frosting in the refrigerator and it will harden up over time until you can pipe it.

Your cream cheese frosting is ready to use! You can pipe it with a pastry bag with a 1A tip or spread it with an offset spatula. It will make any dessert recipe yummier.

Don’t forget to pin for later!