Cream Cheese Recipes

By Food & Wine
Updated January 13, 2017
Cream cheese is an excellent ingredient to include in a variety of dishes. Here, our best cream cheese recipes, including chocolate whoopie pies with vanilla cream cheese fluff, a four-cheese mac and cheese and oatmeal-carrot cookies with cream cheese frosting.
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Blueberry Mousse

Credit: © Eva Kolenko
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Sour cream and cream cheese give this blueberry mousse a wonderful, subtle tanginess.

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Zucchini Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

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It is hard to eat just one of these nutty, gingery, cinnamony cupcakes with their bright-green flecks of grated zucchini.

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Chocolate Whoopie Pies with Vanilla Cream Cheese Fluff

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Chef Michael Voltaggio grew up eating these cakey, vanilla-cream-filled whoopie pies. His mother says that they would somehow disappear during the night.

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Pumpkin Cake with Caramel-Cream Cheese Frosting

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In this fun variation on traditional pumpkin pie, pumpkin cake spiced with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves gets frosted with a slightly tangy, super-caramelly frosting. It's delicious served cold or at room temperature.

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Oatmeal-Carrot Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting

Credit: © Kristen Stevens
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If you like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, then you will love these cookies.

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Four-Cheese Mac and Cheese

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At Slows Bar BQ, Brian Perrone makes his mac and cheese using just cheddar, but its flavor is so rich that customers often assume he uses several cheeses. That inspired Perrone to create this decadent version, which includes cheddar, Muenster, Swiss and just a touch of cream cheese.

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Pistachio Ice Cream

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This exceptionally creamy ice cream relies on two unexpected ingredients: corn starch (to help thicken it) and cream cheese (to make it scoopable).

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Carrot Cupcakes with Caramel and Cream Cheese Frosting

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The cream cheese frosting on these moist carrot cupcakes is intentionally undersweetened to compensate for the sweet caramel topping.

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Farmer's Cheesecake with Strawberries

Credit: Christina Holmes
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For this elegant, no-bake cheesecake, Nicolaus Balla ferments his own farmer's cheese (a kind of cottage cheese). Ricotta mixed with cream cheese makes a delicious substitute for the filling, which is incredibly light, delicately sweet and wonderful inside the crumbly graham cracker crust.

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Classic Carrot Cake with Fluffy Cream Cheese Frosting

Credit: Tina Rupp
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Carrot cake, that 1970s favorite, has a new audience at luxe restaurants like Manhattan's Le Bernardin. At the Urban Farmer in Portland, Oregon, pastry chef Jodi Elliot prepares the ultimate version: moist and not too sweet.

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Mini Black-Bottom Cheesecakes

Credit: Tina Rupp
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F&W's Grace Parisi made several versions of these brilliant little jam-topped cheesecakes, substituting fromage blanc and other tangy soft cheeses for the usual sour cream. Some versions were sweeter, others more tart; all were delicious. In these single-serving desserts from Parisi, the rich and creamy cheesecakes are baked atop a chocolate-wafer base. You don't need any special equipment to make them--just a muffin tin and foil liners.

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Smoked-Trout-and-Caper-Cream-Cheese Toasts

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Inspired by the classic combination of bagels with lox and cream cheese, Tory Miller devised this variation using smoked, locally raised trout and homemade English muffins. It would be equally good on other breads, such as a baguette, or even the bagel that inspired it.

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