This Two-Ingredient Maple Cream Cheese Is Basically Frosting

Perhaps it is my age or perhaps it is the fact that I am a creature of habit—the habits may be chaotic but they are habits nonetheless—but I have been having a heck of a time getting back into my groove after a uniquely chaotic first week of March. A few balls got dropped that week, including this genius comment from a very smart reader, which I fully intended to test out immediately, but forgot about until now:

Credit: Claire Lower

But now that life is back to normal (or what I consider to be normal), I finally made this maple-and-cream-cheese concoction.

The taste is phenomenal, the process easy, and my only regret is that I did not make more. Combine 2 tablespoons of maple syrup for every 8 ounces of room-temp, full-fat cream cheese, and you get a substance that is somewhere in between a breakfast spread and outright frosting. It’s deeply sweet and slightly tangy, with just enough salt (from the cream cheese) and a hint of minerality (from the syrup).

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You can combine the ingredients using an electric mixer (for a fluffier texture), or an immersion blend or food processor (for a silkier, denser outcome), but make sure you scrape the bowl in between mixings, and allow your cream cheese to fully come to room temperature before adding the maple. Cold cream cheese will clump—you can see some tiny clumps in mine because I am an impatient person—and you want yours to be smooth and glossy.

Once mixed, you can drizzle it on cinnamon roll pancakes (or regular pancakes), spread it on an English muffin, or use it as a frosting for a sheet or snack cake. It doesn’t have quite enough structure to coat the sides of a layer cake, but it would be outstanding on top of a carrot cake, pound cake, or any other unfussy cake that needs a last minute frosting.