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31 Cream Cheese Recipes That Are Decadent and Delicious

Updated on February 23, 2024

Consider cream cheese your new secret ingredient for everything from pastas to pastries.

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Photo: Armando Rafael ©

Our Best Ideas for Cream Cheese

If your go-to for enjoying cream cheese is schmearing on a bagel, well, we get that. But! Cream cheese is so much more than that. It’s so versatile, as accomplished at the dessert course as at the breakfast bar, playing nicely with delicate flavors and lending a bewitching tang and creamy complexity to any savory dish that it’s melted into. We recommend always keeping a tub of this rock star ingredient in the house, because you never know when you’ll need a little extra something in an easy pantry recipe—or when you’ll just be in the mood for a bagel. Getting hungry? Once you try cream cheese in Alfredo, you may never go back. The resulting sauce is silky and will not break or curdle! It just envelops each noodle and pea and carries the flavor of the Parmesan.

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Photo: Renee Comet

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

As if a pumpkiny muffin isn’t enough, the sweet crumb topping on these cracks to reveal a decadent cream center beneath. It’s a muffin that’s filling enough to make for breakfast or for a snack that feels as special as cupcakes.

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Cream Cheese Ball

Is it a party if there’s no cheese ball? Writer Michelle Buffardi cites a cheese ball appetizer served at the White House in 1801 in her book Great Balls of Cheese, but the spreadable snack really took off in popularity in the Midwest in the midcentury. They are the entertainer’s best friend—make it ahead, refrigerate and wait for a party to show up!

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Photo: Rob Pryce

Cherry Cream Cheese Galette

Cream cheese adds a gorgeous custardy layer to Valerie Bertinelli’s free-form cherry pie, but it also performs a second function. Though galettes are often purported to be simpler than pie, you can get into trouble when a hole opens up in the pastry, letting the fruit juices leak out all over the place and burning. Here, the creamy filling adds an insulating layer that keeps those juices in.

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