My 1-Ingredient Upgrade for the Best Birthday Cake Frosting of Your Life
I’ve never been much of a frosting person. I like cake just fine, but I don’t get excited about the idea of a cake covered in mounds of buttercream. The exception for me has always been cream cheese frosting, which I first encountered as a kid smeared on top of a carrot cake.
While your typical frosting layers sweet on top of sweet, cream cheese frosting adds a welcome hit of tang to break up the sugar bomb that is a frosted dessert. That said, it can be pretty one-note. While other frostings come in different flavors like chocolate or funfetti, cream cheese frosting is really only ever that one thing. At least, that’s what I thought until I came across Grandbaby Cake’s carrot cake recipe (which is also the winner of our carrot cake recipe showdown). Her surprising twist on traditional cream cheese frosting: brown butter.
Browning enhances the flavor of butter adding a distinctive warm, nutty depth. A classic cream cheese frosting is made from a mixture of cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar. The butter and cream cheese are usually softened, so that they can be more easily whipped together. The process of browning butter involves heating it very slowly on the stovetop until the milk solids are browned, so anytime you see browned butter in a recipe, it’s in a liquid form. To incorporate it into a frosting, it needs to be chilled down until solidified.
Adding brown butter to cream cheese frosting is a game-changing move. It brings all the nuttiness and complexity of browned butter to tangy cream cheese frosting, making it truly stand out. Even though browning the butter adds an extra step, and you have to wait a little while for the butter to chill before you can make the frosting, it’s totally worth it. Plus, you have plenty of time since you shouldn’t frost a warm cake anyway.
Tips for Making Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting
Keep an eye on the brown butter. You can’t make frosting with melted butter, but you can’t make it with rock-solid butter either. Check the butter every 10 to 15 minutes and take it out of the fridge once it’s begun to solidify, but hasn’t completely hardened.
Be patient. Frosting a cake that’s even a little warm is a bad idea. Make sure whatever you’re planning on applying the frosting to is completely cool before proceeding.
Further Reading
The One Cookware Brand That Gordon Ramsay Can’t Stop Talking About
Reese’s Just Launched a Limited-Edition Peanut Butter Cup, and It Tastes 4x Better than the Original
Ball Just Dropped the Most Beautiful Mason Jars for Its 140th Anniversary ("So Iconic!")
