Replace Ermine Frosting With The Tangier Cream Cheese Alternative

Ermine frosting, also known as boiled milk frosting, is a thick and smooth frosting. It's made of thickened milk (which is boiled, as the name would suggest), flour, sugar, and salt, all of which are mixed together and then beaten together with butter. It's less sweet than buttercream frosting, but still plenty sweet enough to work as your frosting for a cake or other desserts.

However, if you're looking for a more dynamic flavor from your frosting, specifically a tangy flavor infused with sweetness, then you may want to opt for a cream cheese frosting alternative instead of an ermine frosting. While you can buy a canned version of cream cheese frosting in the store, it's actually quite simple to make at home.

Most classic cream cheese frosting recipes require just a handful of ingredients: cream cheese, unsalted butter, vanilla, salt, and powdered sugar. First, using a stand mixer, you mix together all of the ingredients except for the powdered sugar. Then, after the ingredients have mixed for about one minute on medium-high and it's nice and creamy, you slowly add in the powdered sugar. And voila — homemade cream cheese frosting is done in just 10 minutes.

So what should you use the cream cheese frosting for?

You're likely to find ermine frosting on basically any type of cake or cupcake. But, as it turns out, cream cheese frosting can be just as versatile and added atop any cake — again, just keep in mind that it has a tangier flavor (while still being sweet). Perhaps, you'd like to add it to a simple vanilla or chocolate cake or slather it over something more complicated like Pineapple Coconut Poke Cake.

But the enjoyment of cream cheese frosting shouldn't stop at cakes. We recommend adding it to cinnamon rolls or even cookies. If you like the idea of cream cheese frosting on cookies, flavors such as red velvet cookies or pumpkin cookies would pair well with it. Or, you could go the simpler route and make sugar cookies to use as a base for the cream cheese frosting — you could even use food dye in the frosting to make the sugar cookies a bit more colorful and festive.

Additionally, you could turn banana bread into a dessert by adding cream cheese frosting. Or, opt to make a sweeter loaf, such as a lemon raspberry loaf or a cinnamon swirl loaf.

But really, nobody is stopping you from adding it to just about any dessert you think could use some extra sweetness in the form of a cream cheese frosting.