Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe

Let’s be honest: the best part of a cake … or a pie … or most baked goods, really, is the frosting. It’s absolutely the icing on the cake. Luckily, it’s not something you need to give up when you’re eating a whole food diet. This healthier cream cheese frosting goes perfectly with your sweet treats.

What Is Cream Cheese? (and What’s the Best Form?)

It’s funny that an ingredient you might have slathered on a bagel also makes for some of the best frosting around. But even though it’s often synonymous with breakfast, cream cheese is really just a soft cheese that’s made from milk and cream and, in the U.S., contains at least 33 percent milk fat. Because it’s an unaged fresh cheese, cream cheese has a short shelf life.

But when it is fresh, it’s mild taste and smoothy, creamy texture make it the ideal ingredient to make frosting with.

The Best Types of Frosting — and That Aren’t Sugar-Laced

Of course, cream cheese frosting is just one of many different frosting types. My favorites are the kinds that aren’t laden with sugar, like this cream cheese frosting but also my chocolate frosting and spiced coconut chocolate frosting.

(My chocolate frosting uses just butter, coconut milk, cacao powder and vanilla for flavor, with all-natural honey to sweeten things up without sending your blood sugar into a tailspin. And my spiced coconut frosting has a secret ingredient: avocados! That’s right, without using butter or cream cheese, you can still get a super creamy frosting without a ton of sugar. These frosting recipes are the best of both worlds: healthier than store-bought but also delicious.)

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Frostings often harbor dangerous hydrogenated fats, too. These industrial trans fats are blamed for more than 50,000 fatal heart attacks a year! (1)

How to Make Cream Cheese Frosting

But when you want a good, basic cream cheese frosting, this is the cream cheese recipe you want to use. It has just four ingredients and takes almost no time at all to prepare. Because of the cream cheese, you’ll want to use this recipe fairly soon after preparing but, trust me, I don’t think you’ll have trouble doing that!

Start with two packs of organic, grass-fed cream cheese, maple sugar, unsweetened shredded coconut flakes and coconut milk. Similar to grass-fed butter, using this kind of cream cheese means you’re getting the most nutritional bang for your buck.

I love that this recipe is sweetened with maple sugar and made nice and creamy with coconut milk.

Add all of the ingredients to a large bowl.