Cream cheese and I have had what one might called a sordid relationship. It was largely ignored throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood due to an irrational hatred of white creamy products that aren’t ice cream or yogurt (still applies mayonnaise and ranch dressing). I was once even told that I wasn’t a “real white woman” because apparently all white women LOVE cream cheese. If Kraft had anything to say about it, I would have expected cream cheese evangelists beating down my door asking why I had rejected their creamy god.
However, the recent adherence to a low-carb diet (resulting from too much of those foods like ice cream and yogurt), I needed to find something texturally similar to my former slow-churned vanilla bean, but without the sugar. Like the girl largely ignored throughout middle school before certain pubescent assets appear, cream cheese now had my full attention. Over the years, I also dabbled with her European cousins like neufchatel and mascarpone, but I always come running back to my new found love. If you thought eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s while watching Bridget Jones’s Diary was shameful, try eating an entire brick of cream cheese, peeling back the wrapper like a massive dairy burrito.
Back to our original product, I always get excited about seasonal flavoring appearing shortly before their corresponding holidays. Pumpkin flavors appear around Halloween, shamrock shakes rear their minty heads every March and eggnog products becomes somewhat tolerable even without alcohol. When I first saw this product, I was ecstatic that it was on sale for only $1.19. I was also excited because we had sampled a similar product at Trader Joe’s that was now out of season and also 2-3 times the price.
It was terribly sweet I feel that it could be swapped unknowingly for a batch of “pumpkin spice buttercream” and no one would be any the wiser. Maybe I’m so accustomed to unflavored cream cheese or just jaded by the deluge of all the other pumpkin-flavored products that pop up around the same time (ice cream and coffee creamer and soy milk, oh my!), but just a spoonful of this stuff was enough for me. It was just a bit too sweet for my liking and I really don’t know what I might put it on since I still eschew things like bagels and bread for the most part. Unfortunately, it looks like this is the only “limited edition” flavor that Kraft has offered (please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but I eagerly await the arrival of a fruitcake flavored cream cheese for Christmas or depression & self-loathing flavor for Valentine’s Day.
Tags: Cream Cheese, Dairy, Grocery Outlet, Holiday/Seasonal, Kraft, Pumpkin
