Cool Whip Gives Homemade Key Lime Pie The Fluffiest Filling

A traditional key lime pie recipe is not meant to be fluffy as the filling is made of egg yolks, lime juice, and sweetened condensed milk. Mashed developer Kristen Carli, however, chooses to change things up a bit in her easy-to-make version by swapping out the eggs for Cool Whip. She doesn't even use the full-fat standard Cool Whip but instead favors the Lite version for her five-ingredient key lime pie. She reasons that the stuff is not only "important to the light fluffy texture of the pie," in her opinion, but she also claims a '90s origin for this Cool Whip lime pie and characterizes that decade as an era "when everyone avoided fat."

Besides what the Cool Whip does for the texture of the pie, this ingredient certainly cuts down on prep work and eliminates baking time altogether. The filling ingredients can be stirred together in a matter of moments, then the pie just goes into the freezer where all of the fluff solidifies into a dense and creamy frozen dessert. As Carli describes the pie, "It's incredibly easy to make [and] you don't even need to turn on the oven."

Since Carli herself makes quite a few tweaks to the classic key lime pie formula, there's no reason you can't follow her lead and put your own spin on this recipe. For starters, you may want to swap out the Cool Whip if you'd prefer to pass on all of its dubious ingredients (the Lite version is made with high fructose corn syrup, palm kernel oil, and several preservatives with lengthy, science-y sounding names). Whipped dairy cream would also make for a fluffy pie and there's no need to worry about it deflating because the pie is served frozen. If you prefer a vegan Cool Whip substitute, you can always beat a can of coconut milk.

Carli sticks to tradition with the crust for her key lime cream pie, telling us, "The graham cracker pie crust is my favorite part [because] I love that salty-sweet crunch." If you'd like to switch things up, though, a coconut or macadamia crust would be delicious, as would one made of crushed vanilla wafers. Even the lime juice can be swapped out for a different type of fruit — Carli herself has a recipe for a sour orange pie that's slightly more traditional, but it should be easy enough to do a mashup of the two recipes and make a fluffy Cool Whip citrus pie instead.