Sweet, Tart, and Creamy Blueberry Cream Cheese Pie

Hey, it's Sam from Sugar Spun Run, and today we are making a blueberry cream cheese pie. This is a perfect warm weather recipe. Very, very minimal baking required. You're just going to need to cook your crust a couple minutes. Great way to use up fresh blueberries. Let's jump right into it. You want to get your oven preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, we are going to bake our graham cracker crust. That way it doesn't totally crumble on us. And speaking of graham crackers, you'll need one and a half cups of crushed graham cracker crumbs, and that is 170 grams. We're also going to be adding a bit of sugar. As with many of my recipes, a blend of granulated and brown sugar works really well for a nice depth of flavor. You could use all granulated sugar if you don't feel like pulling out the brown sugar, but a little extra effort is worth it in my opinion. This is two tablespoons of granulated sugar, and just a tablespoon of firmly packed light brown sugar. Dark brown would be fine as well. I'm just going to stir everything into the fork. Get that mixed up. Break up any clumps of brown sugar. All right, next is our butter. You want to use seven tablespoons of melted salted butter. I prefer salted butter for this recipe. Yeah, seven tablespoons is kind of annoying because then you have like one tablespoon hanging out, but you're going to use half of that in the rest of the recipe. So you'll only need one stick of butter for this whole recipe. Let's drizzle this in. And why seven tablespoons? Because eight tablespoons is simply just a bit too much, and it can make the crust seem a little greasy. Don't want to waste any butter there. And I just like to use my fork to just kind of clob everything together. We want a mixture that resembles like a moist sand. You want all of the graham cracker crumbs moistened. Quick note, your butter shouldn't be too hot because if it is, it can melt the sugar and could also contribute to a greasier crust. All right, grab yourself a nine-inch pie plate. Let's add our crumbs right in the center there. Shouldn't have any dry graham crackers remaining. Use our spatula. We're just going to press these crumbs firmly into the bottom and up the sides of the pie plate. Might seem like a lot of crust, and that's because it kind of is. This is my classic graham cracker crust. And for this pie, there's three elements, and they all work very well together. A thick, crumbly, buttery graham cracker crust, a creamy, perfectly sweetened cream cheese filling, and then that perfectly tart blueberry topping, so fresh. And the crust is so thick, it's going to crumble a little bit when you cut into the pie. That's kind of normal, especially with the first slice. But what I found is that baking the crust for just a little over 10 minutes helps keep it from being like sandy, crumbly. So we're going to bake it briefly. The other elements don't need to bake. And all I'm doing here is just taking my finger to help tap down the crust. As I'm tapping it into the pie crust from the side, I'm also tapping it down with my finger. This is going to go into the center rack of our 350 degree Fahrenheit— that's 175 Celsius—oven, and it bakes for about 10 to 13 minutes. Look for the crust to be beginning to turn—to be turning darker in color, so it'll be like a light golden brown. It's already like golden brown. It should be darkened in color, and I'll show you how that should look. Now while that's in the oven, let's grab our blueberries and head over to the stovetop because we're going to make the blueberry topping so it has a bit of time to cool while we're making the filling. Everything comes together nicely this way. You need a medium or small-sized saucepan. To do this, we're going to add 1 3rd cup or 65 grams of granulated sugar, as well as a teaspoon of cornstarch. The cornstarch—get it out of there— is going to help everything thicken nicely and just keep it from kind of spreading everywhere on top of the pie. Just add a little body. We're going to whisk these together. All right, next up, our blueberries. You could use fresh or frozen for this recipe, but I really like using fresh. You'll need 2 cups in total. That's about 300 grams, but for now, we're only using half of those. So 1 cup or about 150 grams of blueberries is going into our saucepan, and we're also going to be adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Fresh squeezed is best, but it's okay if you just don't have fresh lemons on hand. We'll just drizzle that over the berries. So get those blueberries nicely coated with that sugar mixture. You want everything nicely combined, and then we're going to turn our stove top heat to medium-low. So I like just a notch below medium. Come up to medium if you need to. Let me put you on my new stove. Cook me a minute. We're just going to cook these berries until they release their juices. So everything is going to get—well, then we're going to go a little bit further. But the next step that you want to look for is a nice juicy mixture, and then the blueberries are going to start to soften. So they'll release their juices. It'll become really blue, kind of look a little bit jammy. One step at a time. I like to stir frequently while this is happening, and it can take like 5 to 10 minutes to get to the next step in this process. And if yours starts to bubble and boil a little bit, that's fine. Nothing to worry about there. Different stoves cook differently. So if I were doing this on my induction stove top, I know that my heat would have to be higher. On a gas stove, it can be a little bit lower. The thing is we want to be cooking the berries, and we want to see this breakdown that's happening here. So it should start to look jammy. You can see this mixture is getting nice and dark, and we're just going to cook this until—like if I squish a berry, it should kind of fall apart under the spatula. I want the berries pretty well broken down. They don't have to be completely, but you want them really, really soft. And the mixture should look jammy. I think I've said that a couple times. Now, we know we can remove this from the heat once our spatula starts to leave a trail. And what I mean by that is if you pull a spoon or a spatula through, you can see the trail lasts for a second before it kind of folds back in over itself. So it's slightly thickened. If you pull this too soon, your mixture is going to be more runny. It'll still be delicious. It hasn't ruined anything. But when it's made right, this is nicely thickened, and it'll stay on top of each slice that you cut of the pie. And see, there you go. That trail that forms, it just takes a second for it to close back up over that. So we're good to go. I'm going to turn off my heat, and let's go back over to the countertop. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to pour these blueberries into a heatproof bowl. Suddenly wishing I used a larger spatula because I want all of that blueberry jam in this bowl. Nothing left behind. All right, and our pie crust is actually done. So let's grab that out of the oven right now as well. You can see it's got some darkening around the edges. That's what we want to see. So I will slide this out of the way for now. It's going to cool a bit while we are still working on our filling and our topping. Back to our blueberries. All right, now remember that other cup of blueberries from earlier? This other one cup, or about 150 grams. We're going to add these right into the mixture. So this works really well because we get a nice blend of that jammy blueberry sauce that we made, plus some fresh pops of blueberry in there. I also like to add a half tablespoon of butter. This is salted butter again. So you're using everything but one half tablespoon of a stick of butter. A little funny, but it works best. And we're just going to stir everything together until the blueberries we just added are coated and that butter is melted. Now the blueberries—the fresh blueberries we just added will work nicely to help cool down the jam, but I do want this to be completely cooled before I put it on our cream cheese topping. So I'm just going to get that butter melted and then I'll probably stick this in the fridge for a couple minutes. If you don't want to let it, like, re-solidify or anything like that, it usually only takes like 10 to 15 minutes before it's usable again. So let's pop this in the fridge and we'll go right into making that filling. All right, for the filling, we're basically making like a very simple, sort of no-bake cheesecake filling. We're going to start by whipping our cream to stiff peaks. This is going to give the filling layer a nice body, make it nice and sliceable. You need one cup of heavy cream, or double cream, or heavy whipping cream. Whatever—if it has any of those labels, it's going to work for you, but it should be very cold. That's going to help it whip properly. That's 236 milliliters for those of you doing metric measurements, which is a good idea. We are going to use an electric mixer. This could be done by hand, but it's quite an arm workout. You want to use an electric mixer ideally and whip this until you reach a thick consistency and stiff peaks. I'll show you what that looks like. Okay, and I go all the way to full stiff peaks. So that means I like my mixture to be a little bit fluffy. So just to take a look at how this looks. So you can see this is nice and fluffy. It's thickened. It's whipped cream at this point. So like a cool whip consistency. It's holding on my spatula just fine. And, well, you know, if I hold it straight up, it mounds. It doesn't just drip off. And it's called stiff peaks because the peak that forms will hold its shape and not fold back into itself and fold over. That's how we know we've reached the perfect consistency. So I'm going to slide this out of the way, grab a separate mixing bowl, and here we're going to add 8 ounces or 226 grams of softened cream cheese. I'm just going to use my same spatula. It'll be fine. We're also going to add 2 thirds cup of powdered sugar, 85 grams, and just a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. Things are starting to smell even better in here. And we're going to stir this together until this is completely combined. Try to keep it on low speed so you don't send your powdered sugar everywhere. I'm probably still going to do that. Careful. Increase the speed a bit as that sugar disappears. Okay, let's take a look. Take your spatula, scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. You want to make sure there are no lumps and there's no sugar remaining and obviously that everything is well combined. So this looks good. No lumps. You usually only run into lumps if your cream cheese is too cold. That'll do it. Or if you just don't mix well enough. So I'm going to actually add the contents of the larger bowl to the smaller bowl. I prefer to add the whipped cream to the cream cheese. That's going to go in there. All of it in there. Leave nothing behind. This isn't even a sweetened whipped cream. It's just straight whipped cream. So wouldn't even be good for snacking. Not on its own anyway. Now we're just going to gently fold these ingredients together. Don't use your electric mixer for this step just because that could overdo it and then you can kind of deflate your egg, not your egg whites, your whipped cream. So I'm going to fold this together until it's nice and uniform in appearance. The whipped cream is a brighter white while the cream cheese mixture is more yellow. So you should be able to see when it's combined, but you can also kind of feel it with your spatula because one is a lot thicker than the other. Take your time. It'll take a minute. We need to make sure we give our crust and our blueberries a little bit of time to cool. Anyway, looking pretty good. I'm going to resist the urge to do a taste test. I don't actually need to do a taste test. I know it's amazing. This is nicely combined. Let's bring back our pie crust or let's give it a feel. It shouldn't be warm. If it's warm, it could start to melt the filling, which is not what we want to do. So, all right, and since this is nice and cool, I'm going to just dollop this right in the center. Everything is starting to come together and we are going to smooth this into the crust. Do try to make sure you are getting the filling in contact with all of the crust. So like all of the sides because if you don't press it into the sides, just like with my no-bake cheesecake, you're going to kind of have like a little hole in there that just crumbles when you cut into the pie and it won't stick to the filling. Press that in all the way to the edges. Let me grab my blueberry filling and this should also be nice and cool, which mine is. I'm just going to pour this on top of the pie as well. Once again, none of that filling left behind. It's just too good to waste. This is seriously just—oh! That's unfortunate. That's a little messy. I'm just going to use my spoon to sort of spread this over the edges. I actually don't want to go all the way to the edge. I like to leave some of that cream cheese or cheesecake border there. So leave about a half inch to an inch perimeter just because I think it looks better. It makes things a little tidier when you cut into it. Perfect. It's a humble pie, but it's a delicious one. Just to prevent a skin from forming on the blueberries, I like to take a piece of plastic wrap—see if I can get this to cooperate with me— and just put it lightly over the pie. And then this does need to chill before you can cut into it. I recommend a four-hour chill. Overnight would also be great. And do I have a pie that I prepared last night for this occasion? Yes, I do. Let's go ahead and cut into it. All right, here she is, prepped last night. Uncover. Pie. Ta-da! I always get really nervous with the first slice because the first slice is always the messiest, but we're going to do it. Make sure you cut all the way through, and the crust will crumble a little bit. It should mostly hold itself together. So good. It's a messy pie anyway. It's probably one of my favorites. Could be more beautiful, but this is the reality of the first slice. Honestly, I cannot wait to dig into this. This pie is amazing, and I cannot wait for you to try it. If you do, leave me a comment and let me know what you think because I really do love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time. This is my favorite part. Kasey, I want you to get a close-up. It's messy, but I want you to see this. Well, if I could cut it nicely. Look at that. Crumbly graham cracker crust, creamy filling, tart topping. I'm really excited for you to try this. I feel like it's like a little weird because Beezy's not really a part of it. No, no, it's okay. I kind of love it. Go put a towel on her head somewhere. The fire is hot. It's weird. Delicious, in my opinion.