Cream Cheese Frosting

By Kim Severson

Total Time
15 minutes
Rating
5(187)
Comments
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The trick to making this somewhat heavy icing light is whipping in lots of air. Make sure you beat it at a high speed for 7 to 10 minutes to achieve a light consistency.

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Ingredients

Yield:Enough frosting for a 3-layer cake
  • ½cup/113 grams unsalted butter (1 stick), at room temperature
  • 1pound/454 grams cream cheese, at room temperature
  • ½teaspoon/3 grams salt
  • 1½teaspoons/7 milliliters vanilla extract
  • 6cups/720 grams powdered sugar
  • 2tablespoons/30 milliliters milk or cream, if needed
Ingredient Substitution Guide

Preparation

  1. Step 1

    Cream butter and cream cheese in a stand mixer. Add salt and vanilla. Slowly start to add powdered sugar at low speed.

  2. Step 2

    Once all the powdered sugar is incorporated, turn mixer to high and whip for at least 7 minutes or longer, scraping sides. If the icing seems too thick, mix in a tablespoon or 2 of the milk or cream.

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Ratings

5 out of 5
187 user ratings
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Comments

Mark

This makes about 6-7 cups of frosting. I topped 24 cupcakes and had a full quart left over!

Margaux Laskey, Staff Editor

You're right. This is an adaptation of that recipe, but Kim chose to do it with straight-up cream cheese. You could try a mixture of cream cheese and mild goat cheese; 10 oz cream cheese, 6 oz goat cheese would be a good split. Let us know how it turns out!

Catherine DiNardo

Excellent recipe! Really like the extra whipping -- made for a nice light frosting. This will be my go-to recipe!

Helene

I found this way too sweet. Also, it didn’t firm up right. Maybe I did something wrong while halving the amounts. But I won’t be making this again.

Carolyn

Is there a mistake in this recipe? Ours was so very runny. I did a web search and found someone that said that after adding the sugar the mixture should not be beat very long, because the sugar draws the moisture from the cream cheese. Therefore, beating the frosting too long makes the result runny. Was the 7 minutes of beating for the initial creaming?

Becky

Made only the frosting to go with a coconut cake. 7 cups is an insane amount of sugar - I added 2 cups, tasted it, and stopped there. Belately realized another cream cheese frosting recipe on NYT from Melissa Clark also uses only 2 cups of powdered sugar for the same amount of cream cheese and more butter - would have used that one instead! A little runny at room temp, good for crumb cake but for frosting the whole cake, good texture after being in the fridge.

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