Frosting and Icing Recipes & Ideas

It's the perfect summer treat.

Carrot cake cupcakes are the tastiest way to incorporate a dose of veggies into a sweet treat — especially when there’s a swirl of cream cheese frosting piled on top. These cupcakes are as easy as can be, requiring just one bowl and a whisk to make the batter. Even the kids can help here! The cupcakes emerge from the oven fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg, and the cream cheese frosting whips up fluffy and sweet to finish things up.

If you’ve ever had a Lofthouse cookie, you surely wouldn’t forget it. They’re the thick, puffed-up sugar cookies with a soft texture, a generous blanket of frosting, and a shower of sprinkles over top, sold in plastic clamshells at the grocery store. They’re also our inspiration for these easy-as-can-be pumpkin cookies. They start with a smart buy from the baking aisle, and finish with a sweet, spiced flavor, crackly top, super-soft center, and, of course, frosting.

Good for cakes, cupcakes, or swiping straight from the bowl. (No one will judge.)

A pretty waterfall of frosting is just a few steps away.

With all sorts of spring and summer entertaining on the horizon — graduation parties, Memorial Day cookouts, bridal showers — you’re going to need a fast and fancy dessert to pull out of your back pocket. One gorgeous (and very on-trend) idea is to decorate a basic sheet cake with millennial pink swirls of frosting and gold flakes. Here’s how.

Did you know today is National Caramel Day? To celebrate, we should all probably make this salted caramel frosting. It’s easy enough to whip up on a weeknight and would be absolutely delicious on some cupcakes or brownies (go for the box mix!) — or, you know, just eaten straight with a spoon. No judgements here. This recipe comes to us from Sally, the blogger behind Sally’s Baking Addiction.

This buttercream whips up super fluffy super quickly, and is literally the icing on the cake of any homemade treat.

Tufts of tangy, sweet cream cheese frosting are essential for covering classic desserts like carrot cake, red velvet cake, and hummingbird cake, and it’s sometimes the upgrade you need to make a boxed mix of cupcakes feel luxurious. This homestyle frosting, made with just cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar, gets whipped until smooth and fluffy.

Boiled is not a word you might think belongs in the same breath as frosting, that whipped and luxurious better half of a cupcake. But for those with long memories or grandmothers with a certain bent towards the traditional, this unlikely phrase will evoke yearning and nostalgic delight. Boiled, milk, and frosting — here’s what it is, and why you really must master it. Boiled milk frosting was once the most popular frosting for red velvet and devil’s food cakes.

That lush, rich chocolate frosting you see is made from just two ingredients, and one of them is a vegetable. Chocolate sweet potato frosting is a recipe I investigated with a heft of skepticism. Would the combination of chocolate and sweet potato purée create a luscious frosting the internet had promised me, or was it just a guise for getting unsuspecting eaters (namely, my children) to eat more vegetables?

Easy, forgiving, and oh-so fluffy.

Take a look at these gorgeous cupcakes. Could you ever guess that there isn’t a trace of dairy or eggs in that billowy icing? No your eyes aren’t fooling you — this is icing that’s made without a trace of dairy. The genius lies, instead, in aquafaba. That wild and magical liquid in your can of chickpeas is a powerful vegan tool that, among other things, can make sweet icing to be dolloped and piped onto cake and cookies.

Beets are one of those divisive vegetables — either you love them or hate them. I happen to love them. I’m a sucker for that sweet flesh and gorgeous fuschia color, but I know plenty of people who play for the other team. Beet-haters, I ask that you suspend your disbelief for one moment. Try not to discount the chocolate-beet cupcake based on your feelings for the vegetable alone. Open your heart to beet cake because the final product is far better than the sum of its parts.

A Valentine’s meal is not complete without a bit of chocolate. Here we end with chocolate in the form of a rich, fudgy brownie topped with a whipped peanut butter frosting and finished with flaked salt to tame the sweetness and round out all the flavors. By the time we get to these brownies, we usually skip the plates and just grab a couple forks. The best way to end a special meal.

Looking for more fun and interesting ways to use strawberries right now? This roasted strawberry browned butter buttercream really caught my eye. Roasting strawberries adds a lot of depth to the fruit, and mixing it with browned butter sounds so cozy and rich. Even if you don’t have any birthdays or other celebrations coming up, this recipe is worth making a cake or cupcakes just for fun. Besides the recipe sounding simply delicious, I think it looks so elegant on a cake.

Not so long ago, cupcakes were everywhere. Overpriced cupcake bakeries cropped up on every corner, with twirls of colored frosting and rainbows of sprinkles beckoning from shop windows and enticing cupcake-crazed customers to queue up for their daily fix. We called the demise of this trend all the way back in 2008, and indeed, cupcakes have fallen out of the spotlight. They seem downright quaint now, compared to the Cronut fad.

When making memories is your cookie-decorating goal, reach for this easy two-ingredient cookie icing and our foolproof ingenious method.

I come from a generously-sized family, the sort that prompted wide eyes and under-the-breath counting from strangers who glimpsed our brood at the library or grocery store. I’ll spare you the counting and say that I have five brothers and two sisters, so eight of us, plus parents, and now assorted spouses and in-laws. Christmas is an all-day affair for us, with stockings and enough presents to necessitate an intermission about halfway through unwrapping.

Among the surprises in my first year of being gluten-free has been my growing enjoyment of raw desserts. I love how simple they can be to assemble and often find them more texturally satisfying than gluten-less baked goods. These raw spiced pumpkin cupcakes are filled with autumn goodness and yet are free of many allergens like grains, dairy, eggs, nuts, and refined sugar. And did I mention they’re topped with coconut vanilla icing and ginger date caramel?!

There are buttercreams made with butter and powdered sugar, and there are buttercreams made with butter and egg whites. But for the most silky, decadent buttercream of all, you must try this French buttercream made with egg yolks. Back when I was a pastry chef, I used to make buttercream by the gallon in a huge industrial mixer that stood in the corner and made the floor shake with its vigorous beating.

I was honored when my dear friend Maggie recently asked for my baking assistance; she wanted to conquer her grandmother’s celebrated chocolate cake recipe and thought I might be able to help. Although it is a beloved family favorite, not a single relative has been successful in their attempts to recreate it. I was (overly) confident in my abilities and gladly accepted the challenge. Little did I know how much of a challenge it would turn out to be. What resulted is five (count that, five!

Do you love cream cheese icing? Do you consider it the best part of carrot cake and red velvet cupcakes? If so, then you need to try this recipe. It’s old-fashioned, and it takes a little more time, but oh, it’s worth it. This is so creamy, so rich — and it tastes of cream cheese all the way. My curiosity about cooked cream cheese frosting was piqued by Emma’s recipe for carrot sheet cake, where she mentioned that her aunt usually used a cooked cream cheese frosting.

Last week we showed you a video that illustrated how to whip egg whites and make meringue. Today we’re going to do something with that meringue — pipe it into pretty star cookies. This method of piping using a pastry bag and tip is standard, however, for any kind of icing. So come and watch this video and see how easy it can be to create pretty designs with a simple decorating bag and tip.

Royal Icing can be used on everything from sugar cookies to cakes and is a staple in the world of baking. Once dry, the look is flawless and will leave your friends and families amazed. Most think it’s overly difficult, but in all reality it’s quite simple, it just requires a little time.

We’ve given you an array of sweet treats for Valentine’s Day. There has been rich, creamy crème brûlée, inventive chocolates, and a whipped parfait of blood orange curd. Here’s one last treat: Airy, barely-there angel food cakelets that practically melt in your mouth, topped with a puff of meringue icing colored pink without a single drop of food dye. I had high hopes of bringing you a full-on all-natural red velvet cupcake for Valentine’s this year.

Stella, the blogger at BraveTart, blew my mind. She said you could make sprinkles easily in your own kitchen. Crazy, I thought — brilliant! I obviously had to try it. Here’s how it turned out for me, documented step by step. Now, you may be asking already: Why in the heck would anyone want to make their own sprinkles? Here are three reasons I can think of, off the top of my head: 1.

When we saw this cake, our first thought was, “White icing? Never again.” This is frosting, friends. Gorgeous, bold, sexy frosting. And we’ve got the recipe.Ginny Branch Stelling of My Favorite Color is Shiny made this cake for a friend’s birthday. She admits that her first cake had to be trashed (there was a flour weevil incident), so this one is from a box.

We’ve done a great deal of baking lately for parties, get togethers and functions of all sorts. Although it can seem daunting to always be in the kitchen, it makes things easy when you have a go to recipe you can trust. We’ve been using this lemon icing on everything from scones to cupcakes and cookies!Although we mentioned this recipe back in our Lemon Cream Pie Cupcakes, we really wanted to highlight it because of it’s simplistic nature.

This is one of those cook’s tricks we keep in our back pocket. A simple sugar icing will fancy up some scones for company or add the perfect touch to a batch of cookies. It’s so easy, you don’t even need measuring spoons!All we do is pour a big scoop of confectioner’s sugar or powdered sugar in a bowl. Then we add some milk just a little at a time, stirring all the while, until the sugar melts into a thick sauce.

As winter finishes itself off, we often find ourselves with a few remnants of winter eating lingering in the back of the refrigerator: hardy, woody carrots, soft and wrinkled apples. We didn’t want to waste these last, sweet bites of winter. They are perfect for baking, and we shredded and diced them into a moist, tender cake that is deceptively whole-grain and not too sweet and not too rich. It’s a treat, for sure, but it’s all full of good things.

Also called mousseline buttercream, this frosting is like classic buttercream‘s dolled-up older sister. It requires a little more skill and finesse to pull off, but the bonus is a frosting that will hold its shape and taste fabulous.Mousseline buttercream is made by cooking sugar and water to the softball stage (238°) and then pouring this slowly into the whipped eggs while the mixer is still running. Once this is cool, the softened butter is added.

Oh yes I did. Last Monday night I whipped up some sugar cookie dough, and bought some colorants for royale icing that would transform my plain Jane cookies into some hopeful sunrise cookies for election day.I was inspired by all the Obama cookies I found online and in particular the one I featured in my election night menu ideas post. Plus, with an invitation to an election party featuring “Real American Food” I figured some sugar, white flour and dye was in order.

Knowing how to make chocolate ganache requires understanding just two things: proportion and temperature.