Heavy cream substitute: a surprisingly easy solution!

Heavy cream isn’t a pantry staple for most bakers. So, what do you do when your recipe calls for heavy cream (or heavy whipping cream), and you don’t want to make a special trip to the supermarket — or you need half a cup of cream, and don’t want to buy an entire pint? Look to your butter dish! 

First: What distinguishes heavy cream from milk?  

Heavy cream enhances many baked goods, giving them a sumptuous texture and flavor that plain milk just can’t supply. 

Heavy cream includes an added stabilizer/thickener (typically carrageenan or guar gum), which gives it the mildly thick, creamy texture milk lacks. And more importantly, cream has a much higher fat content than milk. While whole milk contains 8 grams of fat per cup, a cup of heavy cream typically carries 10 times that amount: 80 to 90 grams. Since fat is a tenderizer and flavor carrier, heavy cream in a recipe yields a final product that’s both rich and tasty. 

Photography by Patrick Marinello; food styling by Yekaterina Boytsova

Heavy cream substitute to the rescue 

You can make your own heavy cream substitute by mixing milk with enough melted butter to reach the butterfat level of heavy cream. Since standard butter contains 80 to 90 grams of fat per stick (113 grams), 1 stick of butter combined with 1 cup (227 grams) of milk will approximate the amount of butterfat in a cup of heavy cream.  

This won’t be an exact 1:1 substitute for any recipe that calls for heavy cream, and it can’t be whipped to stiff peaks (more on when and how to use it below!). But this handy substitute can be swapped into most recipes — including scones and biscuits; ganache and other frostings; cooked puddings, and sauces (think caramel) — with little noticeable difference.  

It’s simplest to make one generous cup of cream substitute at a time, rather than trying to conjure your way to the exact amount called for in the recipe. Enjoy any leftover cream substitute in milkshakes, hot drinks, or even drizzled onto your morning bowl of fruit and granola. 

Photography and food styling by Liz Neily

A simple recipe for heavy cream substitute 

You'll need: 

• 1 cup (227g) milk (skim, 1%, 2%, or whole*)
• 8 tablespoons (113g) butter, salted or unsalted

*The variation in fat content for these four milks is small enough that any will work. That said, the higher the fat content in your milk, the better your results will be. 

Place the milk and butter in a small saucepan or microwave-safe measuring cup or other container. Heat, stirring at regular intervals, just until the milk is hot and the butter has melted. Remove the mixture from the heat, and let it rest for 10 to 15 minutes, until it’s lukewarm. 

Using a blender, small food processor, or immersion blender, blend the mixture at high speed for 2 minutes. It will become very frothy. This step is key: It emulsifies the milk and butter, helping prevent them from separating once everything’s cool.  

You can use your heavy cream substitute right away, if you like; you'll need to measure by weight, not volume, as it'll be very frothy. If you don't need it immediately, cover and stick it in the fridge.

You’ll notice that the mixture will gradually become a bit thickened in spots over the course of a day or so; this is the butter starting to separate out. Simply give it a good whisk or shake before using, and it should reconstitute itself. 

PJ Hamel

How to use heavy cream substitute 

Your heavy cream substitute won’t act exactly the same as real heavy cream: It lacks cream’s added stabilizers, so is thinner in consistency. If you were to substitute your homemade cream 1:1 in recipes where cream plays a major role, you’d notice a difference: e.g., ganache would be thinner, and the dough for cream scones or biscuits stickier. 

While you may think the easy solution would simply be thickening your cream substitute with cornstarch or Clearjel, I don’t recommend this. Testing shows that the process is both tricky and unsatisfactory. 

The better solution is to reduce the amount of homemade cream by 25% of what the recipe calls for, by weight. (Measuring by volume is less accurate, since your cream substitute remains somewhat frothy for several days.) 

Say your recipe calls for 1 cup (227 grams) of heavy cream; use 170 grams in its place (or if measuring by volume, a generous 3/4 cup); no other changes are needed. While this lowers the amount of fat you’re using in the recipe, you’ll find that the difference in flavor, tenderness, and/or rise in your baked goods is tiny enough to be unimportant.   

When to use heavy cream substitute 

The following are the types of treats where heavy cream substitute is a good option. Remember: When using cream substitute, reduce the amount of cream the recipe calls for by 25%. 

Scones and biscuits: Cream Tea Scones and Easy Drop Biscuits are two examples of simple pastries where heavy cream, the main liquid ingredient, adds superb flavor and texture. Happily, your homemade substitute will work fine in biscuits and scones calling for heavy cream. You may notice the slightest drop-off in tenderness if you’ve made your cream substitute with skim milk; but browning and rise should be identical to the original heavy cream version. 

Cream pies and quiches: Depending on the recipe (specifically the egg/cream ratio), the pie or quiche may set a tiny bit softer, though it should still be sliceable. Note that your cream substitute can be used in the filling, but can't take the place of heavy cream in any whipped toppings.

Ganache: This mixture of heavy cream and chocolate is used for frostings, fillings, and candy. As such, its texture is key: the center for a chocolate truffle needs to be much firmer than a thin glaze poured atop cake. Ganache recipes call for different ratios of cream to chocolate, depending on what it will be used for; but to obtain the proper texture, you will always want to reduce the amount of cream substitute you use by 25%. This will yield about 12% less ganache than the recipe states. If this is an issue, keep the amount of cream substitute the same as in the recipe, but increase the amount of chocolate by about 30%. 

Photography by Patrick Marinello; Food styling by Yekaterina Boytsova

Puddings: Heavy cream is often used to add richness to homemade cooked puddings (such as this Simple Stovetop Vanilla Pudding), and your homemade cream is a worthy substitute. Use it in bread puddings, too, like this main-dish Savory Bread Pudding. 

Icings and glazes: These simple recipes are usually nothing more than confectioners’ sugar, a touch of salt, perhaps vanilla or another flavor, and heavy cream. The recipe will often direct you to add “enough cream to make the mixture spreadable” (or “drizzle-able”). Do this with your cream substitute, mixing it into the sugar until the icing or glaze is the consistency you want. 

Sauces: Hot fudge, chocolate, caramel — no one will be the wiser when you use cream substitute in these rich cream-based toppings.  

Minor amounts of cream: Some recipes call for a very small amount of heavy cream simply to enhance richness; e.g., Chocolate Midnight Pie, which uses just 1 tablespoon of cream in its filling. Feel free to substitute your cream substitute in any recipe where the cream is clearly peripheral to the main body of ingredients.   

When to avoid substituting homemade heavy cream  

Heavy cream is key to the structure of certain dessert elements, like mousse or whipped ganache frosting. Whenever you see a recipe that calls for beating or whipping heavy cream, you need to use standard, store-bought heavy cream. Your homemade version isn’t stable enough to trap and hold air, and won’t whip into peaks (or even mounds) no matter how long you beat it.

The same holds true for ice cream recipes. While they don’t typically ask you to whip the cream first, that’s essentially what you’re doing during the churning process: adding air to the cream. So use standard heavy cream when making ice cream, or anything else that needs to be churned or beaten, like the filling for this Easy Ice Cream Pie. 

Can you make homemade vegan heavy cream? 

The easiest vegan substitute for heavy cream is simply a can of unsweetened coconut cream; it mimics dairy cream in both thickness and “whippability.” Barring that, you can make a vegan heavy cream substitute with plant-based butter and plant-based milk, following the steps outlined above. For best results, use soy milk, and vegan butter whose texture mimics “real” butter; Earth Balance sticks are a good choice. 

PJ Hamel

Tips for making and using homemade heavy cream  

• Because your cream substitute will remain a bit frothy — even after several days in the fridge — it’s best measured by weight, not volume; use a scale, not a measuring cup.
• Always stir your cream substitute before using; if it feels at all thickened or lumpy, give it a good shake, or use an immersion blender to smooth it out.
• How long will cream substitute stay fresh in the fridge? As long as the milk you made it with; be sure to check the sell-by date of your milk and label your cream substitute accordingly. 

 Buttermilk is another ingredient many of us don’t normally have on hand. Thankfully, there’s a simple stand-in made from ingredients you probably already have in your fridge. See How to substitute for buttermilk. 

 Cover photo by Danielle Sykes; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne.