I made a lemon cream cheese frosting for my son’s birthday cake last weekend, and had to buy 1kg of cream cheese for it, as there was nothing else in the shop.
Now I have the other 700g sitting in the fridge and I need some ideas, sweet or savoury, to use it up, please!
The main caveat is my elder son is allergic to any nuts of any kind, and also cocoa so any chocolate flavouring is out too.
That’s rather a big caveat when looking at cream cheese recipies online! So help me out please and tell me what you like to do with it!
Grab a plate, put down a layer of cream cheese, followed by a layer of cocktail sauce. Top with crabmeat or shrimp. Mix some cream chese with jalapeno jelly. Serve with your favorite crackers.
Mix it with garlic powder*, onion powder, some finely minced green onion (scallion) or chives. Add other flavorings as desired. Sometimes I like dill and parsley, sometimes we do hot (cayenne pepper or similar), a lot of times I just use lots of garlic and onion.
Use as a dip for veggies, crackers, etc. You could probably use it as a meat topping, also.
I love this stuff (despite not being very fond of cream cheese in general), and it’s immensely popular at parties.
*do NOT use fresh garlic, for some reason it breaks the cream cheese. I’ve used crushed fried garlic without problems. I think I’ve used roasted garlic and it was OK, but I’m not sure, so proceed with caution.
I’m partial to tuna and cream cheese dip, myself. Just mix a can of drained tuna with sufficient cream cheese (sufficient is whatever you like the look of), add some flavour with some cayenne pepper or garlic powder, and serve on bagels or crackers or toast or rye crackers or …
I’ve got a Cordon Rose cheesecake sitting in my fridge now. Well, half of one. I made a graham cracker crust for it instead of the ladyfingers, and I topped it with a blueberry coulis (1 pt fresh blueberries, 3 Tbsp sugar, 3 Tbsp lemon juice, pureed in blender, forced through sieve, and chilled). It’s my favorite cheesecake recipe ever, and it’ll use one pound of that cream cheese up.
Well, there’s always cheesecake. Or cheesecake. How about some cheesecake? Maybe cheesecake? And of course cheesecake.
Or you can do some snacks/appetizers like rangoons, pinwheels* or various dips, like hot spinach artichoke dip.
Try checking out this site for more ideas. Except for some reason I am getting a server error when I click “recipes”, perhaps they will have it fixed later. But the cheesecake customizer works.
*Google for “cream cheese pinwheel appetizers” there’s all sort of variations using tortillas, bread or crescent roll dough, for example
Doh! Came in here to suggest just that. Tasty stuff!
Or you could make buttercream frosting. 16 oz (454g) cream cheese, 4 oz (113 g) butter, powdered sugar (don’t know, add till you like how sweet it is) plus some vanilla. Slide a carrot cake underneath it. Or just take two oatmeal cookies and insert frosting between. Mmmboy!
What kind of cream cheese? Since you say you had to buy 1 kg, I’m guessing it might be the whipped stuff, which won’t work for cheesecake (for that you need the philadelphia style bricks).
I don’t know offhand what you can get in stores in backcountry Japan, and I doubt that most of these will work but here are some things I do with cream cheese:
Seven layer dip. Refried beans, cream cheese, olives, tomatoes, cheese, chives, and jalepenos. (Mine turns out to be six-layer dip, I skip the last ingredient.)
A different dipping idea. Giant bag of Doritos. Remove Dorito, dip in cream cheese, dip in salsa, eat. Disturbingly, I got this idea from a Savage Love column about what lesbians do instead of having sex.
Stick in freezer for a while until you can cut it into chunks. Coat in beaten egg and then cornflakes or bread crumbs or what not and deep fry those suckers. Good dipped in salsa.
Bagels. Lots and lots of bagels.
Hope that provided some inspiration for somebody out there; I suspect decent bagels and salsa are hard to come where you live.
It’s just a big block of ordinary Anchor cream cheese. I ordered it from Costco hence the enormous size. But it was that or nothing, being Japan.
It is very hard to get anything packaged here, so whipped topping, graham crackers, ladyfingers, anything like that in a recipe and its out.
I found a nice recipe with just strawberries, cream and cornstarch in it. My garden is full of strawberries and I can buy fresh cream, so I shall use some of it on that.
The dips sound heavenly. I shall look for similar ingredients and have a go!
