What Can You Cook with Cream Cheese

If you’ve cooked up a few of our recipes, chances are you know our worst-kept secret: we love using cream cheese. Adding a dollop to any dish is an affordable way to unlock silky, indulgent texture for fewer calories in an instant. From curries to chicken dishes to sweet desserts, this creamy ingredient is as versatile as it is delicious. If you’ve got a hankering for a decadent-tasting, yet slimming-friendly dish, there’s inspiration for every meal of the day on our list.

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Cream Cheese Breakfast Dishes

Jumping out of bed is definitely easier when you know you’re waking up to a creamy comfort-filled dish. Love it or hate it (you’re far more likely to love it!), our Marmite Mushrooms on Toast recipe kicks off your day with punchy, savoury flavours. On the table in less than 15 minutes, and with only 5 ingredients on the list, it’s amazing how little effort it takes to get all the flavour that ends up on your plate! 

There’s no denying that cream cheese and smoked salmon is a dreamy combination, that’s why we had to put our own slimming-friendly twist on a classic Dill Cream Cheese and Smoked Salmon Bagel. The silky cream cheese, smoky salmon and zesty dill combine deliciously at only 231 calories per serving – bagel included! To make this dish even more budget friendly, you can always swap out fresh smoked salmon for smoked salmon trimmings instead.
You can find the full recipe in our Quick & Easy cookbook.

Since cream cheese lends itself to both sweet and savoury dishes, there’s no reason why you can’t use it to rustle up part of a sweet brekkie treat like our Cinnamon Roll Baked Oats. Low in calories with an irresistible silky texture, low-fat cream cheese is an unexpectedly brilliant base for our cinnamon and maple syrup drizzle. It’s the perfect sweet topping for a bowlful of warming, freshly-baked oats!

Cream Cheese Lunch Dishes

Teaming up the dream combo of salmon and cream cheese yet again, it’s definitely worth cracking out your soup flask at lunchtime for our Salmon, Leek and Potato Soup. By using reduced-fat cream cheese instead of cream, you can still enjoy all the rich, silky texture you’d expect without the typical high calories. To get our soup as smooth and flavourful as possible, using a stick blender makes things so much easier.

With plenty of veggies, potatoes and smoky flakes of salmon, it has all the fuel you need to get through a busy day. Don’t forget to mop up those leftovers with a crusty wholemeal bread roll!

For something a little lighter, cream cheese is a smooth, cheesy addition to the filling for our Low Carb Chicken and Ham Wraps. We’ve spread it over our lettuce leaves to soften their crunch ahead of adding in cooked chicken and ham, but its mild flavouring will work well no matter the meat (or veggie) filling you choose.

Cream Cheese Dinner Dishes

When you’re after a hearty midweek dinner with an added hint of ‘comfort’, there’s no denying cream cheese is a magic ingredient. Since it pairs so nicely with chicken, we’ve had lots of fun trying out different flavour combos in a variety of chicken-based dishes, including our hugely popular Creamy Fajita Chicken recipe. The best part about this dish is you can have all the vibrant, Mexican-inspired flavours you’d expect from making fajitas, without the calories or the faff of preparing wraps. Simply add your ingredients to a large frying pan and let the bubbly cream cheese do all the work for you.

If you like the sound of creamy chicken but you fancy a break from fajita deliciousness, our slimming-friendly Creamy Garlic Chicken, Creamy Lemon Chicken and Creamy Pesto Chicken dishes are all winners too!

It’s no secret by now that if ‘creamy’ is in the name, it’s a winner in our household, and that’s no different with our Creamy Red Thai Curry recipe. The cream cheese in this recipe makes the sauce so much thicker and milder than a traditional red Thai curry, so it’s perfect for getting the whole family around the table – fussy eaters included! Just think of all the veggies you can sneak in with this one…

From curry through to risotto, cream cheese is the answer to the rich, silky indulgence in our Carbonara Risotto. A combination of two Italian favourites, we figured why choose between carbonara and risotto, when you can have both? Stirring this one is well worth the time and effort, but you can make life easier next time by preparing extra for the freezer.

We know keeping on top of what’s in the freezer can get a little tricky, especially while you’re tracking your own calories and goals. That’s why we’ve made sure our Family Meal Planner comes with space to write down what needs using up, so you’ll never have to worry about food waste. How’s that for getting ahead and getting organised?

Cream Cheese Desserts

If you’ve never baked a sweet treat with cream cheese, you need to give one of our creamy dessert recipes a whirl. It wouldn’t be right to talk about cream cheese without mentioning the mother of all creamy, cheesy desserts: cheesecake. For our Millionaire’s Cheesecake, we’ve combined thick, fat-free Greek yoghurt and reduced-fat cream cheese to keep the calories nice and low without compromising on Millionaire’s indulgence. The only ingredient we couldn’t compromise on was the unsalted butter – it’s one-thousand percent needed to ensure the shortbread base is as buttery and crispy as it should be…

There are no arguments when it comes to our Millionaire’s recipe, since it comes neatly sliced into 182 calorie squares. We can’t promise the same when it comes to our showstopping Biscoff Cheesecake (Psst…if you were to ‘accidentally’ cut yourself a larger slice, we wouldn’t tell anyone!). 

You might not expect to find Biscoff-flavoured, caramelised cheesecake on a diet-friendly menu, and yet using sweetened light cream cheese means that you can enjoy all the signature, deep-spiced flavours Biscoff is famous for, without going off track! 

Step aside chocolate and caramel – if it’s a fruity way to make the most of cream cheese you’re after, look no further than our Strawberry Cheesecake Frozen Yoghurt. Inspired by the summertime feeling strawberry cheesecake gives us, we decided to find a way to enjoy the same flavours in a frozen, ice cream-like dessert, for only 152 calories per bowlful (crumbly biscuit topping included!). 

From savoury breakfasts, lunches and dinners through to luscious, creamy desserts, there’s plenty of slimming-friendly ways you can use up that pot of reduced-fat cream cheese waiting in the fridge. How will you be using yours?

Let us know which cream cheese dish you make!

If you’re feeling inspired to cook a creamy dish or bake a cream cheese dessert, we’d love to know! Tell us over in our Facebook group, where there are almost 1 million members sharing ideas and inspiration. 

Our PON gallery’s a really handy place to go for recipe tips or inspiration if you’re undecided on what to cook up next. You can even share your photos with us – if they make us hungry, chances are we’ll send you some SWAG!