Dr Pepper Cream Soda Recipe

Dr Pepper & Cream Soda is Dr Pepper with a cream-soda flavour; the can has no cream in it and the same 150 calories as regular Dr Pepper. To copy it, pour a chilled 12-ounce can of Dr Pepper over a cup of ice and stir in a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. A tablespoon of half-and-half makes it creamy.

What Dr Pepper & Cream Soda is

It is a canned flavour of Dr Pepper that came out in 2020 and is still in the range, next to a Zero Sugar version. Dr Pepper's product page describes it as Dr Pepper paired with the richness of cream soda.

The label on that page explains what the pairing is. A 12-ounce can has 150 calories and 39 grams of sugar, exactly the figures of regular Dr Pepper. The ingredients are carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel colour, flavours, a preservative, phosphoric acid, caffeine and sodium phosphate: no cream and no milk. The cream soda is a flavour, and in the United States cream soda is commonly a vanilla-flavoured soft drink. That is why the copy needs vanilla and nothing else. MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Dr Pepper.

Recipe

Dr Pepper Cream Soda

A home version of Dr Pepper & Cream Soda — a can of Dr Pepper over ice with a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. One glass.

5.0 (1)Print

Prep

2 min

Total

2 min

Serves

1

Cuisine

American

Ingredients

• 1 cup ice cubes
• 1 can (12 fluid ounces) Dr Pepper, chilled
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Fill a 16-ounce glass with the ice.
2. Pour the Dr Pepper over the ice slowly, down the side of the glass, so it keeps its fizz.
3. Add the vanilla extract and stir once, gently, from the bottom up.

Nutrition

Calories:

160

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Creamy Dr Pepper, and a sweeter one

The card copies the can. Soda-shop versions go further, and each change is one ingredient:

• Sweeter, like a soda fountain: 1 tablespoon of vanilla syrup in place of the extract. The vanilla syrup on this site is sugar, water and vanilla.
• Creamy: 1 tablespoon of half-and-half, poured over the top last. It sinks through the soda in swirls; stir once.
• A float: one scoop of vanilla ice cream in place of the ice. Pour the soda in two stages, since the foam rises.

Plain milk is the one thing to avoid: the acid in the soda curdles it.

How to make a dirty Dr Pepper

A dirty soda is a soft drink with syrup and cream stirred in, a style that Food Network traces to Utah. For the Dr Pepper version, PepsiCo's recipe for its restaurant customers uses lime, coconut and creamer. In kitchen measures:

• ice to fill a short glass
• 1 1/2 teaspoons lime juice
• 1 tablespoon coconut syrup
• 2 tablespoons non-dairy creamer, or half-and-half
• 7 ounces Dr Pepper, plus a splash to top up

Add everything to the glass in that order and stir. The same idea with Mountain Dew is the dirty Baja Blast.

Cream soda from scratch

Without the Dr Pepper, the same vanilla makes a plain cream soda. Stir 2 tablespoons of vanilla syrup into 1 cup of chilled club soda over ice. Add the syrup first and the soda slowly, or it foams over.

Can Dr Pepper itself be made at home?

No. According to Wikipedia, Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s by the pharmacist Charles Alderton in Waco, Texas, and its formula of 23 flavours is kept secret. What can be made at home is a Dr Pepper syrup, the soda simmered down until it is thick, which is how the Dr Pepper shake on this site gets its flavour.