Cream Cheese Frosting

Frosting? Icing? Whatever…

This cream cheese frosting / icing / whatever is perfect for making any sort of vegetable cake: carrot, parsnip, beetroot, instantly less virtuous. Which can only be a good thing. But my favourite cake to pair it with doesn’t have a vegetable in sight, just lots of food colouring. Fill and cover a Red Velvet with it and it has the opposite effect in managing to make a very slutty cake slightly less wanton, simply by dint of not being vanilla buttercream. My kind of miracle.

This amount makes enough to fill and cover a four layer 7 inch / 18cm cake.

INGREDIENTS:

350g full fat cream cheese / soft cheese

280g salted butter - if you prefer, use unsalted but do add a tiny pinch of salt to balance the sweetness.

280g icing sugar / powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

HOW TO:

• Soften the butter until it has the consistency of softly whipped cream.

• Weigh the icing sugar into a mixing bowl, you can sieve it if you can be bothered or just break it up with a whisk.

• Add the butter and vanilla to the icing sugar and mix together until you have a smooth even mix. The butter should be soft enough that this can easily be done by hand, but be my guest if you want to use an electric mixer.

• Weigh the cream cheese into a separate bowl and gently mix to break up any lumps.

• Add the smooth cream cheese to the butter and sugar in large spoonfuls, fold and mix each one in by hand.

• I don’t recommend an electric mixer at this stage because if cream cheese gets over beaten its water is released and the frosting will suddenly go runny and unsalvageable.

• When all the cream cheese has been evenly incorporated it’s ready to use straight away or it can be kept covered in the fridge, where Google tells me it will keep for 2 weeks.

Tat x