Creamy Sweet Potato Frosting (Without Powdered Sugar)

This sweet potato frosting is smooth and creamy and sweetened only with maple syrup (no powdered sugar, no cane sugar). Just four ingredients are all you’ll need for this recipe.

Search for sweet potato frosting on the web and you’ll find only chocolate sweet potato frosting. I’m sure it’s totally yummy, but not what you get here.

This frosting is such a perfect topping for cinnamon flavored desserts including my gluten and dairy-free carrot cake cupcakes. And, because it’s not too sweet, top my gluten-free, dairy-free sweet potato muffins, zucchini,carrot, apple muffins, gluten-free pumpkin bread, and vegan, gluten-free pumpkin bread. See my full list of gluten-free muffins and gluten-free cupcakes.

Frosting Cakes

This frosting is not as firm as a traditional buttercream frosting. I have used it in layer cakes, but it needs dam of buttercream frosting if you use it between layers. A dam is a ring of firm frosting around the edge of inner layers. This will hold softer fillings and keep them from oozing out. This frosting is firm enough to pipe and loosely hold simple shapes.

Ingredients

Sweet potato – Home-baked garnet or jewel yams work best for this recipe. I tried using canned sweet potato and the water content was too high. So plan to bake them yourself. I baked mine in my Breville Toaster oven (with temp controls) so I don’t have to heat up my big oven. This takes a little time, but to have a frosting that uses so little sweetener is worth it to me! Once it’s baked, you’ll puree the yams in the blender or food processor.

Butter – Unlike in most frosting recipes, the butter is added to the sweet potato melted. It incorporates better this way.

Maple syrup – less than 1/2 cup of maple syrup sweetens this frosting. If you prefer, agave or other sweeteners can be used.

Cream cheese – The combination of the butter and cream cheese works best to make this a smooth, creamy frosting. I tried this recipe with vegan cream cheese (Violife) and it worked, but was much softer – somewhere between and icing and frosting consistency.

Mixing the Frosting

This frosting does best when it is mixed with all ingredients slightly warm. So once the sweet potato is pureed with the melted butter and maple syrup, you’ll want to warm up the cream cheese. I smash it onto a plate and warm it in the microwave in 5 second increments until it is close to the temp of the sweet potato mixture. If it is cold, you’ll end up with little lumps of cream cheese in the frosting.

More Frosting Recipes

If you’re looking for more, here is my full list of frosting recipes including my pipeable cream cheese frosting, vegan chocolate cream cheese frosting and my strawberry buttercream frosting.