Another Successful Experiment!

I was in the mood for something sweet, but had limited ingredients on hand. I decided to use up some of the powdered sugar and cream cheese I had gotten on sale sometime...in not too ancient of history.

Normally when experimenting, I have a recipe, or two, or three...that I start from and make adjustments from there. Today I just started with 2 ingredients and modified from there based on how things were going...it was actually fun-especially since it turned out!

So, what was this recipe? Frosting-starting with cream cheese (Neufchatel, aka 1/3 less fat cream cheese) and powdered sugar. I didn't have much on hand that was I was going to be able to frost. No cookies, no cake, no graham crackers, or pretzels or any of the usual things I like to put frosting on. So, thinking through what might be OK with frosting added, the best options were the banana bran muffin batter in the fridge-bake a few muffins and frost while warm. Then, if extra frosting, I have both banana muffins and pumpkin muffins in the freezer. So, cream cheese frosting sounded like a nice accompaniment to any or all of these. Knowing what I do about flavor balance, I added a pinch of salt, then was debating what flavoring to use. I only have vanilla, almond and lemon flavoring on hand...almond didn't sound right with cream cheese and vanilla sounded too ordinary, so I opted for lemon. Lemon suits cream cheese very nicely! And, the frosting was delicious on a fresh hot banana bran muffin! Next question, just exactly how does frosting improve the health of an otherwise healthy snack? It doesn't, but it sure tastes good! :)

Recipe? Here goes, but since I was not basing it off anything, I of course also was not recording exactly what I did, so these are estimates.

Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting (not even remotely healthy)
1 8-oz pkg neufchatel cheese
~4? cups powdered sugar
pinch (~1/8 t) salt
1 t lemon flavor

Soften cream cheese and add sugar a cup a time. After first cup of sugar is mixed in, add salt and flavoring. I really do not know for sure how much sugar I used. I know I put in 2 cups. (I measured a cup, put it in the sifter and added it, repeated with another cup. Then forgot I was measuring before putting in the sifter and just dumped a bunch of sugar in the sifter...until full...and it is supposed to hold ~2 cups, hence my estimate of ~4 cups sugar.) Anyway, keep adding sugar a cup at a time until desired consistency. I wanted this a little on the soft, sticky side since I wanted it more as a glaze really than frosting. To test this recipe, I fixed a fresh muffin, topped with frosting while the muffin was still hot and allowed frosting to melt into muffin-amazingly delicious!

I may post the muffin recipe...later! :)