Dessert
3852 recipes found
Prune Pudding
This smooth, satisfying pudding recipe served at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's White House originally called for leaving the prunes in water overnight. But now that pitted prunes are readily available, an hour’s soak is all you need to speed the cooking process. Sweet, but not overly so, it lends itself to delicious variations: add a bit of cardamom; sprinkle with walnuts; spoon some over thick, creamy yogurt; or try all of these together. The strong cinnamon flavor and dark color make the pudding ideal for autumn and holiday desserts. The portions here may seem small, but as with any dish involving prunes, a little goes a long way.
Chocolate Truffle Pie
Date and Walnut Cookies
This recipe comes from “Treasured Recipes Old and New 1975,” a community cookbook by the Schuyler-Brown Homemakers Extension in Iowa Falls. It was contributed by Wilma Miller, who credits the recipe to her great-aunt. Ms. Miller wrote that the original recipe called for two pounds of walnuts, but that she prefers it with pecans “and not that many.” That makes sense. Mixing in even a pound of nuts requires the arms of a sturdy farm wife. The recipe yields enough for an entire church supper.
Poundcake and Strawberries
A hard man I know made this dessert once out of supermarket cake and industrial strawberries, to serve small children who were maybe slightly afraid of him. They gurgled with delight when he slid bowls of it before them: the cake cut into large cubes and served beneath the macerated strawberries, with fresh whipped cream. This formed a bond between them all. In the crowd in which I run, poundcake and strawberries has since become a spring and summer standard, the cake home-made and, when we're lucky, the strawberries gathered from fields nearby. But not always. A supermarket version is a worthy substitute.
Salted Cocoa-Hazelnut Cookies
These are a classic slice-and-bake cookie, ripe for improvisation. Not into hazelnuts? Pistachios, almonds, even chocolate chunks are great here. Don't worry too much about getting the perfect cylindrical log; the dough should even out most imperfections as it bakes.
George Lang's Honey-Poppy Seed "Salami"
Jelly Doughnuts
Where doughnut shops tend to rely on fluorescent red, sickly sweet jelly, you are free to use jelly (or jam, or marmalade, or whatever you like) that actually tastes good. The only specialty tool you’ll need is a pastry bag. But you can also poke a funnel into the side of the doughnut and spoon the jelly into the center of the pastry.
Chocolate-Pecan-Rum Pie
Neiman Marcus's Chocolate Chip Cookie
Aylenish Rugelach With Orange, Walnuts and Cinnamon
Once upon a time, good Jewish housewives (known as balaboostas in Yiddish) all knew how to make pastries like strudel, rugelach and schnecken from scratch, using a cream-cheese-enriched dough supposedly stretched thin enough that you could read the newspaper through it. This was a day’s work, but with the arrival of good-quality puff pastry on the market, modern bakers can quickly (“aylenish” in Yiddish) produce this close cousin: a sweet, fragrant filling of nuts, spices and dried fruit wrapped in rich dough. Orange marmalade gives a tart undertone (and the faintest suggestion of a Christmas fruitcake), but apricot or raspberry jam are also considered classic.
Lazy Sonker
It’s not a pie, nor is it really a cobbler (though, to some, they are one and the same). As Kim Severson reported in 2013, when she traveled to Mount Airy, N.C., to try the regional dish: “Most people seem to agree that the essential characteristics of sonkers are these: They are juicier than cobblers. They are deeper than cobblers. They used to be made in what Southern country cooks called bread pans.” This recipe, adapted from Wilma Fleming of Barney's Cafe, draws its flavor from strawberries, or pitted cherries, and is capped with a simple crust of milk, sugar, flour and salt, whisked to the consistency of pancake batter. It’s a perfect dessert for spring or summer gatherings, and best served while it’s still warm.
Honeyed Pistachio Mooncakes
Mooncakes are pastries timed to the Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday that celebrates the commencement of the harvest season. Traditionally, they showcased the best ingredients of a region, like sweet lotus seed paste in Guangdong, China, melon seeds in Hainan or pork in Yunnan, but you can stuff mooncakes with whatever you’d like, as long as the fillings are encased in dough and the exterior is aesthetically pleasing. In her forthcoming cookbook, “Mooncakes and Milkbread,” the Chinese-American baker Kristina Cho has channeled that spirit by stuffing her mooncakes with blitzed pistachios and honey, a combination commonly found in baklava. The blend is enveloped in a classic Cantonese crust that uses lye water to bump up the pH of the dough, giving it a gentle amber hue, and golden syrup, which lends the cake a chewy, soft bite.
Strawberry Shortcake With Lemon-Pepper Syrup
Here’s a take on the perfect summer birthday cake: a buttery, vanilla-scented spongecake doused with ripe strawberries and fresh whipped cream, gilded with a spicy-tart syrup to cut the sweetness. After the cake cools, you’ll cut it into two layers and put them back together with the sliced strawberries, which have been resting in some sugar and lemon zest, your whipped cream and the lemon-pepper syrup. Then top the whole thing with more whipped cream and serve it up. It’s a couple of hours of your time, resulting in a treat appropriate to welcome anyone’s next trip around the sun.
Chocolate Chip Pastry Cream
You can use this rich, custard-y chocolate cream for almost any cake, cookie or pastry that requires a filling. Italian-American culinary traditionalists will bristle at the thought, but we think it would be delicious piped into a cannoli shell.
Oatmeal Chocolate-Chip Cookies
Garam Masala Pumpkin Tart
President Obama’s first state dinner at the White House, just before Thanksgiving in November 2009, honored Manmohan Singh, then the prime minister of India, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. The chef for the dinner was Marcus Samuelsson, who decided to incorporate some Indian touches into the menu. Both naan and cornbread were served, and the dessert for each of the 400 guests was a pear Tatin and a pumpkin pie tartlet. “I flavored what I consider a very American pumpkin pie with a staple of Indian cuisine: garam masala,” Mr. Samuelsson wrote in his new cookbook, “Marcus Off Duty: The Recipes I Cook At Home,” where he gives the recipe, but as a large tart, not an individual tartlet. It adds a worldly touch to an American tradition, ideally suited to Washington.
Apricot Tart With Pistachios
Working with phyllo dough is easy and satisfying, especially for cooks who are inclined to shy away from making pastry. Frozen puff pastry is having a moment, but for little effort, you can achieve similar results with phyllo sheets and never lift a rolling pin. Bright orange apricots are the ideal fruit, but other summer stone fruits, such as pluots, plums or nectarines, also work well. This makes a very impressive open face tart with a very crisp, ultraflaky crust.
Fruit, Poached and Marinated
Fruit compotes make great compromise desserts; they’re sweet, but not as sweet as sorbets, and like sorbets they don’t require flour, butter or pastry skills. I didn’t develop any kind of knack for pastry until I began collaborating with pastry chefs on their cookbooks, but for years I managed to round out my dinner parties with fruit-based desserts(though the children of my friend Clifford Wright used to roll their eyes when I brought dessert – “She doesn’t bring dessert, she brings fruit,” they’d say). I revisited some of those desserts this week, particularly various fruits poached in wine, and I still find them delightful. I find that I’m sometimes negligent about eating fruit in the colder months, but not when I have some wine-poached pears, bananas or prunes in the refrigerator. I am as likely to stir the fruit, with its luscious syrup, into my morning yogurt as to eat it for dessert, andthe compotes are good keepers. Early spring is an in-between time for fruit. Stone fruits aren’t ready yet and it’s not really apple, pear or citrus season either, though all of those fall-winter fruits are still available. I poached pears in red wine and bananas in white wine, and used dried fruits for two of my compotes, prunes poached in red wine and a dried-fruit compote to which I also added a fresh apple and pear. For the last compote of the week I combined blood oranges and pink grapefruit in arefreshing citrus-caramel syrup, and topped the fruit with pomegranate seeds. Even if my friend’s kids wouldn’t agree, this was definitely dessert. Bananas Poached in Vanilla-Scented Chardonnay Summary:Don’t overcook the bananas in this easy dish, and you’ll be rewarded with a fragrant, delicious dessert. I am usually not one forbananas in desserts, but this, if you’re careful not to overcook the bananas, is heavenly. Years ago, in the early days of my career as a vegetarian caterer, I made it often; it was one of my most requested desserts. These days I’m as likely to spoon some of the bananas with their fragrant syrup into a bowl of morning yogurt as I am to serve it after a meal.
Hillary Clinton's Chocolate Chips
Fred’s Peanut Butter Cookies
Crêpes Suzette
This is just one of those desserts that seem, on the page as on the plate, to be labor-intensive and tricky, but in fact are as simple to make as they are gratifying to eat. For one thing, you can make the crepes in advance; they could sit, piled between torn-off sheets of baking parchment and well wrapped in the refrigerator, for a good three days without coming to any harm. But I must admit to taking, more than once, an even quicker route: using good store-bought crepes. Once they're immersed in the sweet orangey syrup, they will not betray their prefabricated origins.
Pumpkin Skillet Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting
Fall in simple skillet cake form, this easy pumpkin cake that can be made in one bowl. The frosting is fluffier and comes together more quickly with the help of an electric mixer, but it can be mixed by hand in a pinch. It's also great without a drop of frosting.
Salty Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies
These cookies offer a terrific blend of salty and sweet, with the crunch of the peanuts lending a bit of texture to a chewy treat. They are also very easy to make and require only about an hour. But watch the timer — if they are overcooked, they will lose their chewiness.
Sichuan Chile Crisp Sundae With Peanut Streusel
This sundae is based on the soft serve and chile oil combination that started showing up in Chengdu and Chongqing in 2018. The combination doesn’t sound like it should work, but it does, especially paired with a Sichuan snack-inspired spicy peanut streusel. You can use store-bought chile oil or chile crisp, such as Lao Gan Ma, in place of homemade Sichuan Chile Oil. You can also omit the peanut streusel or replace it with crushed peanuts.