Velvety, versatile

With its smooth texture and stabilizing action, cream cheese works well in a variety of desserts.

Velvety cream cheese is a key ingredient in a host of desserts. Its tanginess blends perfectly with lemon and other citrus and berries, while the creaminess contrasts beautifully with crisp pastry and soft-crumbed cakes.

Mixed with sugar and an egg or two, cream cheese can be swirled into coffee cakes and brownies. It can become the luscious filling in a raspberry-cheese Danish. And that frosting on red velvet cake? Cream cheese again. It’s a truly versatile part of the baker’s tool kit.

Cream cheese accounts for 10 percent of the nearly 15 billion pounds of cheese sold in the United States this year. So where is all that cream cheese going?

Angela Wiggins, a spokeswoman for Kraft Foods, which makes Philadelphia cream cheese, said a recent customer survey found that about two-thirds of us use cream cheese as a spread or dip. The other third of us use cream cheese for baking, like in the recipes included in this story.

Cream cheese is widely used as a substitute for part of the fat in cakes and pie crusts. A cream cheese pound cake uses cream cheese as a substitute for some of the butter or shortening. The substitution gives the cake a more tender crumb and just a bit of sharpness .

In her 1997 book “Cookwise,” Atlanta food chemist Shirley Corriher writes that cream cheese’s high fat content makes an easy-towork pie crust that bakes up with good color. She credits the protein and milk sugars in the cream cheese for that extra help with browning. A typical cream cheese pie crust recipe will use half cream cheese and half butter.

Cream cheese can also substitute for some of the cream or condensed milk in flan. Recipes for flans labeled “Puerto Rican” or “Cuban” often use this alternative, resulting in a more firm texture.

STYLING BY C.W. CAMERON / PHOTO BY RENEE BROCK/ SPECIAL Cream cheese and its softer counterpart Neufchâtel can add tanginess to fillings, frostings and cakes.