Active Galactic Nuclei ( AGN ) vary in their brightness across all wavelengths .
Moreover , longer wavelength ultraviolet - optical continuum light curves appear to be delayed with respect to shorter wavelength light curves .
A simple way to model these delays is by assuming thermal reprocessing of a variable point source ( a lamp post ) by a blackbody accretion disc .
We introduce a new method , CREAM ( C ontinuum RE processed A GN M arkov Chain Monte Carlo ) , that models continuum variations using this lamp post model .
The disc light curves lag the lamp post emission with a time delay distribution sensitive to the disc temperature-radius profile and inclination .
We test CREAM ’ s ability to recover both inclination and product of black hole mass and accretion rate { M \dot { M } } , and show that the code is also able to infer the shape of the driving light curve .
CREAM is applied to synthetic light curves expected from 1000 second exposures of a 17th magnitude AGN with a 2m telescope in Sloan g and i bands with signal to noise of 500 - 900 depending on the filter and lunar phase .
We also tests CREAM on poorer quality g and i light curves with SNR = 100 .
We find in the high SNR case that CREAM can recover the accretion disc inclination to within an uncertainty of 5 degrees and an { M \dot { M } } to within 0.04 dex .