What's a bagel without cream cheese? It's just a bagel. Okay, so it's still good, but you can't get delicious cheese cake without cream chesse. The only problem - 2 tablespoons (or about an ounce) of the regular stuff is 100 calories and 10 grams of fat - that's almost one third of the daily recommendations for fat in your diet. Thank God there is now a lower calories/fat alternative - two alternatives in fact - light and fat free. We chose to review the light version, because the fat free version costs more.

We taste tested the 'Garden Vegetable' on a bagel. The Garden Vegetable variety provided a nice change from plain cream cheese, and the light variety was just as tasty as the original version. I have no complaints about the taste and really couldn't tell the difference between this and the full fat flavor. I also tasted the cream cheese on its own sans bagel and it was still delish! The 'light' cream cheese has 50% less fat than the original, at 4.5 grams for a serving of 2 tablespoons, in addition to providing 60 calories, 2.5 grams of saturated fat (13% of daily recommendations), 15 mg cholesterol and 190 mg sodium (8% of the RDA).

From the Kraft website, if you want to substitute Philadelphia Light Cream Cheese block for regular block cream cheese in a chilled cheesecake, add an extra teaspoon of gelatine dissolved in a tablespoon of water to the recipe. For a baked cheesecake add extra table spoon flour, cornflour or custard powder to the recipe.

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