Ina Garten's Cream Cheese Frosting Uses These Ingredients

BHG / Ana Cadena

Ranking right up there with dreamy buttercream and perfect-for-cutout-cookies powdered sugar icing, cream cheese frosting is consistently among the most popular homemade frosting recipes on our site. Rich in texture and flavor, sufficiently sturdy for decorating a cake, and just sweet enough, many of us on Team BHG are proud members of the cream cheese frosting fan club, too. 

We also adore the classic combo of softened cream cheese and butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. It’s timeless, versatile, and takes less than five minutes to mix up. But we couldn’t resist putting a few spins on the concept. To date, we’ve added honey, melted white chocolate and dark chocolate, and mascarpone cheese and cardamom (yes, in addition to the cream cheese).

However, chef icon and cookbook author Ina Garten recently informed us we’ve been overlooking another serious cream cheese frosting upgrade—and her video had us running to the Test Kitchen to try it out ourselves.

Although this recipe originally appeared in the 2012 cookbook Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust, it’s having a renaissance thanks to the playful, Easter-themed Instagram video Garten posted to her feed mid-March.

While rocking a pair of bunny ears, she hops into the frame to rave about her Carrot Cake with Ginger Mascarpone Frosting. While the cake itself ~takes the cake~ as the showstopper, we took notice of the frosting—and her recipe had us sprinting to the kitchen, asking ourselves, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

In a bowl of a stand mixer or a large bowl with a hand mixer, add 12 ounces of room temperature mascarpone cheese, 4 ounces of room temp cream cheese, 2 cups of sifted powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons of heavy cream, and ½