Healthy cake frosting (slightly keto/paleo-ish)

Someone who knows passed on to me the best carrot cake recipe in the world, and so I made some for my birthday. Special occasions are the only times we'll have white sugar in the house. So I went ahead and made the original recipe. 500g of icing sugar (or powdered or whatever they call it in your country) in the recipe. Yikes, that's over a pound of bleepity-bleeping white sugar going into our bodies, I keep thinking as I'm rolling around a scrumptious morsel of it in my mouth.  

I actually doctored up the cake part a little bit to make it healthier because I can't stop myself from doing those things, but I really couldn't think of a way to make the a workable, delicious cake frosting without icing/powdered sugar.

But I want to "health up" the recipe so I might think about having this more than once a year. If I could really get it ketoed or paleoed up, I would be really thrilled.

So this frosting will have cream cheese, butter, powdered vanilla bean and ... ???
I will probably sweeten mostly with ground, dried stevia leaves. This will turn it very green, which is not my goal, but stevia in leaf form is much healthier and cheaper than the white powdered processed stuff you buy in supermarkets. The frosting probably needs something added for texture, as the icing sugar seems to add volume, and smooth and thin the mixure out. And sugar is also a preservative that I suppose helps keep the frosting and the cake fresh and edible for a few days. I may throw in some coconut sugar to take the stevia-y edge off the taste, I can live with a bit of that. That will turn it brown, so who knows how the color will turn out! Probably still quite green though. I might take advantage of this and add some turmeric to the cake mix to make it bright orange for contrast.

And then for the cake part, I suppose I could try a combo of almond, coconut, quinoa and buckwheat flours to substitute for the whole-wheat flour in the recipe too. That would be the keto version, not sure how paleo folks address the idea of a cake or how you might paleo it up. I know maybe making a cake runs contrary to the actual spirit of paleo in the first place, but orthodoxy aside, I'm wondering if I could make something that scratches my cake itch in a somewhat paleo-friendly way. I do like going back to the most basic or ancient ingredients possible without stopping having fun in life, ha, ha...

Anyway, has anyone ever attempted anything like this? Any advice or secret ingredients? Any failed or successful experiments that might inform my efforts?

You could lean into the green and blend stevia with avocado?  It would turn brown if not eaten right away, though.

Other thought, seed or nut butter whipped with a small amount of sweetener and enough water to lighten the texture.

How about fruit? Smash some bananas, mix with whipping cream and vanilla. Fresh berries would also be good. Honey for sweetening.
Maybe they'd be goopy but I think it would taste good. Freeze-dried fruit would be fun to play with for flavor too.

It IS possible to make a decent cake from nut or seed flours but you can’t simply substitute one of them for wheat flour and expect to get something edible.  The glutens and protein in wheat make all the difference. A simple on-line search for keto cake will bring you to successful recipes using nut flours.

From what I have read, you are only wanting an icing recipe with cream cheese?

I like the idea that JB suggested with fruit so my suggestion would be some apple juice as it will not turn brown like stevia leaf, banana, or fresh apple.

Since it is a carrot cake why not try using carrot juice to sweeten the icing.  That would give it a nice orange color maybe.

instead of using blended green stevia, could you make a strong tea with it and use that as a sweetener? I grow it and occasionally do that where the ground up leaves would be strange to find (like in icing).

Blend equal amounts cream cheese and softened butter, along with whatever flavorings and sweeteners you're using, trying to keep the added moisture to a minimum. If you want to lighten the texture, whip some cream separately, then fold it into the cream cheese mixture.

we make a carrot cake and it requires a frosting.

we use just cream cheese, butter, vanilla, honey.Maybe 1/2cup of honey for a whole 13" x 9" cake. it is no where near the 3 cups of powdered sugar :)

I tend to make most recipes with less sugar than required.

We even water down apple juice because it is too sweet.

Wow, thanks for all the good ideas everyone! I think the ones that keep moisture in the frosting to a minimum will be the most successful, and are probably the ones I'll try first. And they will also keep better, I'd like the cake to last 4 days or so at least. I have made a few runny frostings in my day and I'm wary of stepping on that particular rake again. I like the idea about adding whipped cream to lighten if necessary, that's a great one, thanks Ellendra.

I like the strong stevia tea idea, Terry, but I usually get good enough results with super-ground-up leaves that I later put through a fine sieve to get out the little bits of stem and leaf vein that seem to always remain. This is one of the things I use in my homemade toothpaste and it's pretty darn acceptable. So at least on the first try I'll try that. But I reserve the right to steal your strong stevia tea idea for other dishes in the future, actually, I may try that on the cake part.

OK, I tried it today, and it was... OK.

Cream cheese, softened butter, vanilla, and stevia was the initial idea.

I decided to double down on the green of the stevia and add pistachio nuts for a bit of crunchy texture. So I tried chopping them up a bit in the blender, which produced, even at low speed, a dismaying variety of chunk sizes ranging from still-whole nut meats to some powdery shmootz approaching nut butter. I ended up creaming it all, and I can't say anyone noticed a pistachio taste in the final product, so that particular sub-experiment is now off the list for future batches.

Next surprise was the texture... So thick the (high-powered) blender couldn't blend. I really need to get an old electric beater or a fancy countertop mixer gizmo, but for now I've got enough expensive appliances and I'm using what I've got. I use the blender for the frosting in the original recipe with powdered sugar. Anyway, I added some creme fraiche (like sour cream) to start thinning it out and it was getting a bit sour, so I switched to fresh whipping cream. I kept adding that carefully bit by bit and it took quite a lot to make the mix manageable.

Then I had a flashback and remembered observing in the regular recipe how the mixture thinned out and smoothed out when the icing sugar was added, it really surprised me how it changed the texture and made it more manageable.

Anyway, back to now: Color. I was expecting bright green like my homemade toothpaste with stevia and it was a milky yellowish green instead. Makes sense with all that cream cheese and cream I suppose. Didn't know what to do about that, couldn't think of anything appropriate to add to green it up -- any ideas?

Next: Taste test told me this is too stevia-y. So I broke down and added 1/3 cup of evaporated cane juice (I won't use the 'S' word), which we in our house call "rat poison." That took the edge off a bit. It could have used more but I didn't want to add more. Coconut sugar would have totally ruined the color. In retrospect, maybe Xylitol would have been the ticket. Xylitol makes things sticky and runny in my experience, so not sure how that will pan out.

I noticed the mass was getting grainy and the grains were surrounded by a tiny bit of watery stuff. So I decided to add something like the cornstarch that's in icing sugar. I reached for agar agar and then arrowroot, as I kept adding more whipping cream. Finally I got it to an acceptable texture that would blend.

The result was just passable. Color was weird. Texture was more light and whipped-cream like than I wanted. It was not quite sweet enough. And it lacked that sparkle and compactness that the icing sugar gives it.

So next time I'll make some adjustments. Probably will add more stevia and use xylitol too. Maybe I'll look for especially green stevia leaves to make powder of. And maybe I'll look for some neutral-tasting, acceptable oil that's high in Omega 3's and low in Omega 6's to thin it out instead of whipping cream -- anyone know of anything that fits the bill? I'm trying to avoid the typical seed oils (sunflower etc.) that are high in Omega 6.

Hope my meh experiment can serve to inform others' efforts for a healthy cream cheese frosting, anyway. And if anyone wants to report on their experiments at healthy cake frosting, please do!

I made a keto carrot cake just a few days ago.  Came out dry.  Recipe had only butter and eggs as liquid, but I added a lot of milk to bring the batter up to cake-batter-texture.  The frosting is cream cheese and butter, softened with sour cream, (for 8 oz cream cheese, 1/2 cup butter, add 4 tbsp sour cream) (I doubled the frosting) sweetened with my personal fave sweetener, NOW Better Stevia (extract).  

I had a great idea though, last time I ate a slice:  put in a wide flat bowl, soak the cake part in lots of cream.  It worked.  Much better!  

Thinking about the idea of soaking dry cakes with cream, there's a method of using a "cake soak" that's been used by cooks for a long time.  
You poke holes from the top of the cake down into the cake, then pour on a cake soak, which is basically a mixture of a liquid, a sweetener, maybe a fat like melted butter, poured into the already-baked cake to make it "irresistibly moist."  (That ought to be possible using stevia as a sweetener, seems to me. )  You can then frost the cake or not as you prefer.

Well I've just about finished my dry carrot cake so ... next time I bake a cake (I like using a bundt pan), I'll try using a cake soak.  (another possibility is adding some kind of alcohol to your soak, btw).  You end up having to keep the soaked cake in the fridge though.  

Just thought I'd mention it.  

Interesting about the cake soaks. My carrot cake recipe is pretty moist so I will probably use that in another recipe... thanks for the tip.

My burning questions though are:

1) how was the texture of your frosting?
2) how did you mix the frosting and how did that go?
3) If you kept it outside the fridge, how did it keep?

Thanks Jenn!

The frosting on the carrot cake came out "okay," but texture was thick, heavy, sort of rubbery like cream-cheese.  The sweetness was right because you can taste the frosting and adjust the stevia before you put it on the cake.

To mix the frosting, I microwaved the bowl with cream cheese and butter until the butter was mostly melted and the cream cheese was well softened.  Then added the sour cream and stevia (extract).  Mixed with my extremely olde, garage-sale-bought, electric hand mixer, which is doing great btw.  Started at medium speed on the mixer and ended up on high speed.   After I frosted the cake, I sprinkled on some chopped walnuts.

I didn't keep it outside the fridge, so can't answer that one.  I just stuck the cake (on a plate) in the fridge till the frosting had gotten cold enough to get hard, then covered the whole thing with a standard grocery-store clear plastic veggie bag with a twist-tie.  (the bag sticks slightly to the cake every time you open it up to cut a slice, darn it, but it does keep the cake fresh.)