How To Make Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

I'm going to show you how to make lemon cream cheese frosting. Okay, we're going to start out making a lemon-scented cream cheese frosting. We've put about a cup and a half of granulated - you want the coarse grains for this particular process - granulated sugar in our bowl.

We have a whole lemon and what we're going to is take our zester and we're going to zest the lemon into our sugar. All the flavour, the lemony flavour and scent is in the essential oils in the skin and you want to just lightly take off the coloured portion of the skin. If you have a waxy surface, just give it a good wash to get some of the wax off that they put in some of the shops, put on their fruits to make it look nicer.

But wash it down and then you just want to scrape with your zester the colour and you'll be able to smell it, that you're getting the oil. Okay, so this is how bald you want to leave your lemon. You don't want any of the white showing because that's the pith and that's quite bitter.

You just want the flavour which is from the zest that we have in our bowl. The next step you want to do is put it on your mixer, put your blade on and you want to release all the oil and that's where the granulated is really good. You want it to really tear it up and to take out the oils from the zest that you put in there.

How do you know when it's done? You'll see inside your bowl that the colour's going to slightly change in your sugar and you're going to really smell it. It's incredibly fragrant and that's when you're ready, and what this process does is actually impart the flavour throughout all the sugar and you flavour your sugar which then when you start adding the rest of your ingredients is going to disperse throughout the whole frosting and even very pungent finish. So, that's really strong right now.

And just have a look. The finished product is slightly yellow and you have all of your zest in there which is fine and it's going to add some nice colour as well as give you the flavour. So, into this to finish our cream cheese frosting, we're going to add cream cheese which is a pretty key ingredient.

We add about 8 ounces of cream cheese in and you can do this one or two ways. I personally love mascarpone. Some mascarpone cheese we're adding, about 6 ounces of that in.

You can also use butter, really soft butter, instead and it's just another nice rich fat to go into your frosting to give you a nice creamy velvety texture. But in this case, we are using the mascarpone and then combine those two together in our bowl. Now, if you're using butter instead of the mascarpone, you're going to have to beat it a little longer to really incorporate the butter throughout.

The mascarpone works really nicely as it's easy to cream and combine the two. If you find that your frosting is liquidy and it's not coming together nicely, you can always add a little more citrus so in this case, we're using lemon because we have the lemon zest. If you're making it with orange, you can use orange juice that pulls together.

What the citrus does is it curdles cream cheese again and it firms it up so if you want an even stiffer frosting, you can add that citric acid, that juice, into your frosting. So, that is about ready and we're going to put a little dollop of vanilla into this so about half a teaspoon to give this a little background and depth for the flavour and take it off, and we'll scrape this down and make sure we have all of our flavours combined. So, scraping down our sides and checking the bottom of our bowl, that looks very good.

So, that is a finished cream cheese frosting. And that's how you make lemon cream cheese frosting. .