The Pudding Mix Trick For Stable, Sweet Flavored Whipped Cream

The moment you try homemade whipped cream, you'll never go for the store-bought stuff again. Having a container of Cool Whip in the freezer can come in handy when you're desperate, but none of the other manufactured whipped cream options can ever live up to whipping it together yourself.

While you might not need whipped cream every day, it's a great addition to all sorts of sweet dishes and desserts. Old-fashioned peach cobblers, waffles, and pumpkin pies can all get an elegant boost from a dollop of whipped cream.

While whipped cream isn't that hard to make, it does need to be made fresh. If whipped cream sits out for too long, it will start to separate. Even after a few hours the fats and water in the cream will start to separate. Your whipped cream will look deflated and have a coating of water on its surface as well. Luckily, there's an easy fix to this problem that can provide a boost of flavor as well.

The cream has a high-fat content. When it's whipped vigorously those fat cells are able to trap air inside them in the form of bubbles. This is what gives whipped cream its light and fluffy texture. The problem is that the far more dense fat will start to lose that structure after a while, and the lighter water in the mixture will gather on the surface of the deflated whipped cream. The best solution — if you need to make whipped cream ahead of time — is to add a food stabilizer.

Stabilizers are a type of food additive that is most often used to mix oil and water together in recipes. These two substances typically repel each other, and so stabilizers help to keep a dressing or sauce from separating. Substances like pectin, lecithin, corn starch, or cream of tartar can also be added to other recipes to help them maintain their shape, or push back their expiration date as well.

Our favorite way to stabilize whipped cream is to mix it with a bit of instant pudding mix. This easy addition will help whipped cream keep its shape for up to 48 hours. It can be used to add a flavor boost of either vanilla or chocolate to complement your recipe as well. Because instant pudding works so well as a stabilizer, this method is best reserved for recipes that require piping or spreading a layer of whipped cream on top.

To make whipped cream with this method, simply add a tablespoon of instant pudding per cup of cream to the confectioner's sugar before adding it to the cream. Then whip it up as usual, and you're ready to go.

This method's stability and light flavoring make it a great substitute for Cool Whip when it's called for in a recipe. It's also one of the easiest ways to prepare whipped cream ahead to save yourself some time.