Dessert
3853 recipes found
Dora Charles’s Lost-and-Found Lemon Poundcake
The South has about as many poundcake recipes as there are grandmothers. This one produces a higher, lighter cake than many recipes. It came from Dora Charles’s aunt Laura Daniels, who got it from a nursing-home patient she was working with in the 1970s. The patient, Mary Martin, mailed it to her long after she left the nursing home, but because of a stroke, her handwriting was shaky. Ms. Charles found the recipe and deciphered it, and included it in her cookbook "A Real Southern Cook: In Her Savannah Kitchen." You can use lemon juice and zest instead of lemon flavoring, which the original recipe called for, or increase the vanilla by a teaspoon if you are leaving out the lemon altogether. The cake, which is a perfect base for peaches and whipped cream or another fruit topping, gets better after a couple of days and will be good for a week if you keep it well wrapped. It freezes well, too.
Melon and Ginger Soup
Reserve melons that are so ripe, sweet and juicy that they practically fall apart when you cut them for this soup, which is inspired by a recipe by Deborah Madison. Smell the melons when you shop for them at the market; they should make you want to close your eyes and drink in their fragrance. If they’re not really sweet, the soup will be bland. Both cantaloupe and honeydew are great sources of potassium and vitamin A.
Teff Carrot Cake
This deeply spiced carrot cake is studded with toasted walnuts and coconut, and sandwiched with a tangy mix of cream cheese and butter. It's also gluten-free, and festive enough to prepare for a special occasion. The cake comes from the San Francisco pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt, whose interest in baking with alternative flours has led to many exceptional wheat-free creations. Made with teff flour and sweetened with a mix of coconut sugar and granulated sugar, it results in a tender, moist crumb and irresistible texture.
Blond Mocha Sauce
Blond mocha, so called because although it is based on a traditional mix of coffee and chocolate, the chocolate here is white. Together with the cream, the coffee and the chocolate make for an almost butterscotch-cappuccino taste. Once the sauce is whisked, poured into a jug and left to cool in the fridge, it thickens voluptuously. Serve it with store-bought ice cream, and reheat the sauce if you desire. Warm, it is rather like a fabulous latte to pour on your ice cream.
Cappuccino Walnut Cookies
Toasted Almond Snowballs
Browning almond flour for these cookies adds a deep layer of toasty flavor, intensifying their overall nuttiness. Feel free to substitute other nuts: Pistachios, walnuts and pecans work particularly well. Snowballs keep, stored airtight at room temperature, for about a week.
Jean-Georges's Minimalist Rhubarb Soup
Pistachio Linzer Cookies With Orange Marmalade
These are linzer cookies — with a twist. Pistachios replace almonds, and orange blossom water accentuates the flavor of the pistachios and orange marmalade. They're much tangier and a bit less sweet than the traditional ones, but just as buttery, rich and compelling.
Rice Flour Poundcake
Rice flour makes this poundcake melt-in-your-mouth tender, and gives it a mild and delicate flavor that’s spiced with a touch of black pepper. It keeps well, so feel free to bake it a day or two ahead of serving, or eat any leftovers for breakfast. This recipe was created by Zachary Golper of Bien Cuit bakery in Brooklyn, who prefers Japanese rice flour for its consistently fine particle size, but any white rice flour will work. (Note: If you don't have an 8-inch loaf pan, you can use a 9-inch pan but the baking time will be about 5 to 10 minutes shorter, and the loaf will be flatter in appearance.)
Blood Orange Flan
Winter is the time for citrus fruits — tangerines, clementines, grapefruit and oranges. The most exciting orange variety may well be the blood orange. Well known in the Mediterranean, blood oranges are now grown in California and Florida as well. The ruby red juice has great visual appeal. In this flan, the burnt sugar caramel helps balance their sweet, somewhat tropical flavor.
Flan de Leche
This traditional Iberian flan, is now sometimes called “Flan a la Antigua," or Flan of the Past. That’s because it doesn’t include the common New World ingredients of condensed and evaporated milk. Instead, it is pure poetry made of eggs, sugar and milk. It does call for modern technology — blender and microwave — to streamline the preparation. The edge of sharp caramel against the round sweetness of custard is what makes the dish, so be sure to cook the caramel well past golden.
Pecan Pie
Pecan pie is to the Southern Thanksgiving table what pumpkin, mince and apple pies are to the Northern version of the meal. Pecan trees can be found in back and front yards in Georgia, Texas and states in between, and pecan pie is a year-round dessert. The classic rendition is cloyingly sweet, because of the cup or cup and a half of corn syrup that most recipes call for. But you can dispense with the corn syrup and use a combination of mild honey (like clover or acacia) and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which has a wonderful flavor that is almost like light molasses. It’s not the standard corn syrup, but you’ll end up with a pie that’s lighter but still sweet, true to Southern style.
Kringle
A classic pastry that originated in Racine, Wis., the American kringle has a flaky, buttery crust and a sweet, tender filling. This one, which is adapted from “Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland” by Shauna Sever, is rich with almond paste. While kringles are best served within a day or two of baking, they can also be frozen. Just wait to ice them after defrosting, otherwise the icing gets a little sticky.
Black Pepper and Bourbon Caramel Chews
Soft caramels are not inherently elegant, but these are thanks to a gentle sprinkle of black pepper and a dash of bourbon. The recipe does require a candy thermometer.
Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake
Take advantage of rhubarb season with this easy dessert. Baked and unmolded, this cake resembles a pale pink mosaic atop velvet-crumbed and vanilla-infused cake. The rhubarb, which you’ll add in raw, is tangy and tender, firm enough to give you something to chew over. It’s an easy half-hour of prep and another hour and change in the oven, ample time for a light supper, anticipation of dessert hanging in the spring air.
Citrus Salad With Prosecco
This elegant, simple variation on fruit salad makes a refreshing first course, but could also be dessert, depending on the menu. A sprinkling of sugar and a splash of Prosecco elevates fresh fruit in a surprising way. In winter or early spring, make it with all kinds of colorful citrus— especially blood orange and pink grapefruit. In summer, use the same method with stone fruits and berries, like peaches and blackberries.
Speculaas
Here is a recipe for the St. Nicholas Day treat (also called speculoos or Dutch windmill cookies) enjoyed in Belgium and the Netherlands. They are traditionally molded into the shape of windmills, but these crisp, almond-y spice cookies will turn out well if you roll out the dough and cut out any shape you like. This version is an adaptation of one found in Anita Chu's book, “Field Guide to Cookies: How to Identify and Bake Virtually Every Cookie Imaginable.”
Hazelnut, Orange and Honey Biscotti
Orange, hazelnut and honey make a wonderful combination in this whole wheat biscotti. The hard cookies should be sliced thin, which will yield a lot of cookies! They are wonderful dipped in tea.
Black-and-White Cookies
There is no reason to settle for a stale shrink-wrapped cookie from the produce market. This classic New York cookie is easy to make.
Dick Taeuber's Brandy Alexander Pie
In January 1970, The Times published a recipe for brandy Alexander pie. It was an unassuming confection: a graham-cracker crust filled with a wobbly, creamy mousse and enough alcohol to raise the hair on your neck and then make your neck wobbly too. Later that year, Craig Claiborne, then the food editor, declared it one of the paper’s three most-requested dessert recipes and ran it again. By rights, this should have been the recipe’s swan song. But thanks to Dick Taeuber, a Maryland statistician, the pie lived on. Taeuber discovered that you could use a simple formula to make the pie in the flavor of almost any cocktail you wanted (3 eggs to 1 cup cream to 1/2 cup liquor). In 1975, Claiborne renamed it Dick Taeuber’s cordial pie and published it once more, this time with all 20 variations (see note). Calling it a cordial pie doesn’t quite capture its punch or proof. Booze pie would be more fitting. It’s not the kind of thing you want to serve for a children’s birthday party.
Pear and Frangipane Crostata
Basically a batter of ground almonds in a buttery sweet Italian-style crust, this easy tart is sublime with a little sugared fruit baked on top — apples or pears in the cold months, cherries and stone fruit in summer — but it is also very good plain, served with a fruit compote alongside. A small wedge is sufficient after a big meal, but no one will complain if you serve a dab of whipped cream or ice cream on the side. This tart is best on the day it is baked: Save time by making the dough and lining the tart pan up to a week in advance and freezing.
Cranberry Linzer Torte
This version of Linzer torte, a classic Viennese pastry, has a dough with a high proportion of ground hazelnuts and almonds. It is usually filled with a raspberry or apricot jam, but cranberries make it a perfect Thanksgiving dessert. The secret to rolling a dough made with nuts is to keep chilling it if it becomes difficult to handle. Linzer torte keeps up to a week if well-wrapped, and also freezes well, before or after baking.
Almond Spritz Cookies
A holiday classic found in nearly every cookie box, these almond-flavored treats are buttery, crisp and all too easy to eat by the handful (fear not, this recipe makes a lot). Spritz cookies also keep well, for up to two weeks stored in an airtight container at room temperature. If you don’t have a spritz gun, you can use a pastry bag to form them. Or, for more rustic versions, skip the pressing altogether. Chill the dough for an hour, then roll out 1-inch balls, placing them 1 ½ inches apart on the baking sheets, then use a fork to flatten them. A sprinkle of colored sugar makes everything pretty.
Pear Snacking Cake With Brown Butter Glaze
This moist and tender cake has a similar texture to pumpkin or banana bread, with a delicate pear flavor scented with nutmeg and a touch of clove. But the real star is the brown butter glaze, which is nutty and rich, tasting a little like butterscotch, with a strong vanilla sweetness. The cake keeps well when stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, though the glaze will lose its snap from the chill. Or, bake the cake ahead, then glaze it a few hours before serving for the best texture. You can freeze the unglazed cake as well, up to a month ahead.