Photo: Pen Waggener / Flickr

A carrot cake is not quite a carrot cake if it doesn’t have a cream cheese icing. It does make the cake seem a little less healthy when you have a closer look at the ingredients: besides cream cheese, vanilla extract and lemon juice, you’ll also need some good old fashioned butter and icing sugar. But it also makes the cake that much more delicious. The trick is to give the cake a thin layer of icing and place the extra icing in a bowl in case you want more.

Ingredients for carrot cake icing

This carrot cake icing recipe makes 150 grams of icing and shouldn’t take you much longer than 10 minutes to prepare. You will need the following ingredients: 25 grams of butter, 50 grams of cream cheese, half a teaspoon of freshly squeezed and strained lemon juice, a quarter of a teaspoon of vanilla extract and 65 grams of sifted icing sugar.

Icing method

Cut up the butter into tiny pieces, place them into a bowl and work the butter into a pomade. Add the cream cheese and mix the two together with a wooden spatula until you have a very smooth mixture. Place the cream cheese and butter mixture into a food processor and add the lemon juice and vanilla extract. Mix for five seconds and no longer.

Scrape the sides of the bowl before adding the icing sugar. Mix again until the mixture is creamy (this should not take longer than 10 seconds). Place the carrot cake icing into a bowl and cover it with cling film. Spread the icing over your carrot cake only once it is completely cool and preferably just before you serve your cake.

This carrot cake icing will keep for four days in the fridge if it is kept in an airtight container.

Tags: baking, cake recipes, desserts