Cream Cheese Frosting

This simple Cream Cheese Frosting is perfect for cakes, garnishing cheesecakes or just eating with a spoon. Just kidding… maybe. It’s rich and creamy… and easy to make with just 4 staple ingredients.

I realized recently that I had this cream cheese frosting as a garnish on a few of the Instant Pot Cheesecakes that I’d shared but didn’t have the recipe on all of them. This is not like my crusting cream cheese recipe – this is a softer recipe!

It is also great as filling for macarons so it really deserves it’s own post!

I have to tell you – this is my most favorite frosting of all time. My favorite combination is to eat it on this chocolate cake, but I swear, I will spoon it on top of just about anything and gobble it up!

Here are just a few of the other recipes where I use this frosting:

Desserts with Cream Cheese Frosting:

• Red Velvet Cake
• Strawberry Cake
• Homemade Black Forest Cake
• Instant Pot Key Lime Cheesecake
• Instant Pot Cranberry Orange Cheesecake
• Instant Pot Pumpkin Pecan and Chocolate Chip Cheesecake
• Chocolate Macarons

This recipe makes a small batch of frosting which is great for garnishing Instant Pot Cheesecakes. But I highly recommend doubling it to frost or decorate a whole cake.

I use my Bosch mixer for 99% of my baking adventures these days but I just happened to have my 18-year-old Kitchenaid out for another project so I used it to make the cream cheese frosting today.

And it worked great. I have these scraper paddles (that I’ve had for years) and I love doing frosting with those so I don’t have to scrape down the bowl a dozen times.

Then I scooped it into a frosting bag and used it to fill some Dark Chocolate Maracons. This was my first attempt at this recipe – the texture wasn’t quite right but they did look pretty: