Cream Cheese Icing

Photo originally uploaded by Nettsu.

Today's Joy: Carrot Cake & Homemade Cream Cheese Icing.
Happy Weekend, Reader. After a good day of helping out at our family farm and grocery shopping, I decided to spend a relaxed afternoon baking something gorgeous. Up among my boxes in storage is a brand new glass cake stand I've been itching to try out. Add to that, my favorite recipe for fresh cream cheese icing (we'll get to the specifics later) and we are talking about a seriously delicious creative project.

If I'm having a tough week or need some quality time to think through a problem, few things get all my creative neurons firing like getting in the kitchen and whipping up something yummy. Call it Culinary Problem-Solving. For me, it's cathartic, inspiring and usually produces a tangible form of love to share with the people around me. A win-win for everybody!

Carrot cake is the quintessential stage for cream cheese icing, and Duncan Hines makes this divine mix with real carrots & raisins that is, truthfully, better than what I'd make from scratch anyway. So I open the package and follow the directions and watch all that gooey goodness congeal as I stir it by hand (already had the KitchenAid full of icing by this point). If you love cooking the way I love cooking, Reader, you know there comes a moment during preparation when you just know the dish is gonna come out fabulous. After that, it's all semantics. This time it happened while I was stirring the cake batter. It's a wonderful feeling. Like providence and fate and knowing what comes next all rolled into one. Like an inoculation of good luck that makes everything you touch for the rest of the day come out like magic.

So after I got the cake into pans and into the oven, it was time to turn the creativity up a notch and finish the icing. I've been perfecting my Cream Cheese Icing recipe for several months now. It's a lovely, simple recipe based on the classic standard you will find in any edition of The Joy Of Cooking. Just a bit less precise.

My Cream Cheese Icing:
2 8 oz. blocks Philadelphia Cream Cheese, softened
2-3 cups powdered sugar
A generous splash of pure vanilla extract (Mexican Vanilla makes it out of this world)
2 good shakes of McCormick Saigon Cinnamon

In a stand mixer, combine all ingredients and whip on low until peaks emerge and icing is thoroughly combined.
Easy-sneezy and makes enough icing to cover a single-layer fluffy Duncan Hines carrot cake.

For a round double-layer cake, use 4 blocks of cream cheese, 3-4 cups of powdered sugar, double the amount of vanilla and add an extra shake or two of Saigon Cinnamon.

The results were as expected: O-M-G good! And I got a whole lot of thinking done. All in all, a very successful afternoon! Hope you find something creative to do this weekend, Reader. May it bring you much joy!