The pantry staple my co-worker converted me on

Are Parmesan crisps a supermarket staple?

How likely is our audience to deep fry anything?

Will our readers grill on a weeknight?

A few years ago, senior Test Kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic was assigned development of a chocolate Swiss roll (I am dropping the paywall on this recipe for a week so you can check it out!) for our sister brand Epicurious. She had a curious proposition for how to make the whipped cream filling, which has a starring role in the cake. Specifically, she wanted to stabilize it through the off-label use of a supermarket staple: instant pudding mix.

Simply filling the cake with unstabilized whipped cream is a bad idea, since it will deflate quickly and leach water, sogging out the cake. Stabilization means using a thickening or emulsifying agent that allows the fat, water, and dairy solids of the cream to stay in suspension. All of this sounds very science-y but, as Shilpa explained, instant pudding powder contains modified starch that has been pre-cooked then dried, so it doesn’t require heat to gel and thicken liquids.

Using it is a vastly simpler process than gelatine, which needs to be bloomed, softened using heat, then quickly used before it can set. At our tastings, where we evaluated several versions of the Swiss roll, the advantage of using instant pudding powder was clear; the assembled cake could be made days in advance and yet the whipped cream stayed soft and supple.

The only question was: Would readers use it? Not only are we calling for an unexpected product as an ingredient, but it is one that many serious cooks would immediately disregard. It’s not a question of cost or availability, but rather a question of whether our audience would trust us and be willing to try something unexpected.

Well, I can speak for myself. Despite starting out as an instant pudding skeptic, this cake is now the go-to birthday cake for my family. I tend to cover it in a thin layer of ganache for extra moisture-retention as well as chocolate intensity. It holds for days swaddled in parchment paper, and I even freeze it and allow it to defrost with few ill effects, something you could never do with non-stabilized whipped cream.

Of course, not everyone agrees with us. One commenter writes:

“The sponge is lovely. I really disagree with adding pudding mix to the whipped cream—the artificial taste is overpowering, even using the amount called for. I much prefer using unflavored gelatin to stabilize the whipped cream.”

In fairness, there is an overblown artificial vanilla quality to instant pudding mix, but we purposefully calibrated the recipe to account for that (by also including real vanilla paste or extract, plus a liberal amount of salt).

Over the years I have been heartened to see many positive comments as well. In fact, we have now used vanilla instant pudding powder in other multiple bakes, such as Shilpa’s Giant Cinnamon Bun (you can also check out this post about it on Bake Club’s Substack), where it helps gelatinize the gooey cinnamon filling for a Cinnabon-like effect, and most recently in her Strawberry Shortcake Roll, where it again provides stability to the whipped cream filling (and barely caused a ripple of dissent in the comments).

Was it the right call to jump into the pudding deep end a few years ago? How many people does it put off from trying these recipes? I will never know, but sometimes I just have to trust that our readers will be willing to jump in right alongside us.

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