This chai spice buttercream is luxuriously creamy and smooth with unbeatable spice flavor from cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and allspice. It’s everything we love about chai spice lattes in sweet frosting form and you can use it to garnish many baked goods such as banana cupcakes, pumpkin cupcakes, vanilla cake, and more.
Is frosting the best part of a cake? Depending on the recipe, I could go either way but frosting is, undoubtedly, a fun accessory to add to our baked goods. And the frosting category on my website is growing! I pair a lot of my cupcake recipes and cake recipes with frosting and now I’m creating separate pages for most of the frosting recipes. Use the Frosting Recipes page to browse different options for pairing with your desserts—you can mix and match frostings and cakes/cupcakes to make your very own flavorful combination!
Chai spice lattes were the inspiration behind today’s frosting recipe. I always pair it with chai latte cupcakes, but there are so many other pairings for this spiced buttercream! In fact, readers have emailed me that they love it with pumpkin cupcakes and these gingerbread cupcakes. Yum!
This chai spice buttercream starts with this vanilla buttercream as the base. This is an American-style buttercream made with room temperature butter, confectioners’ sugar, creamy liquid such as heavy cream, milk, or half-and-half—plus vanilla extract and a little salt to taste. The chai spice variation is slightly increased, uses heavy cream for a rich and creamy consistency, and also includes spices—it’s unbelievable how much flavor dry spices can add to our frosting.
A blend of 4 kitchen spices makes the delicious chai spice flavor we love. To make chai spice at home, combine cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and allspice. As the recipe instructs below, we’ll use this chai spice mix in the frosting and you can save a little extra for garnish on top. You could also use this chai spice mix in place of cinnamon in banana cake, banana bread, snickerdoodles, and star bread. We use these same spices when making chai spice donuts and chai cinnamon swirl Bundt cake.
In Other Frostings: You could even add 3/4 – 1 teaspoon of this spice mix to cream cheese frosting or Swiss meringue buttercream. Add it when you add the vanilla extract. (Adding all of the chai spice mix before would be overpowering, so use only 3/4 – 1 teaspoon.)
Browse my cake recipes and cupcake recipes for more flavor inspiration. The frosting recipe below is enough for 12-16 cupcakes, a thin layer on a quarter sheet cake, or a 2 layer cake. For a 3 layer cake, I recommend 1.5x the recipe to ensure you have enough for each layer.
Flavored with robust spices, this homemade chai spice buttercream is luxuriously creamy, silky, and smooth.
