Dessert
3901 recipes found
Simple Bread Pudding
This recipe is proof-positive that leftover bread can easily be converted to dessert without much work. There’s room for customization here: Consider adding fresh or dried fruit or a combination of spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cardamom. Bread pudding makes a great brunch dish, served with fresh fruit compote. Or add a handful of chocolate chips before baking for a decidedly more decadent outcome. Discover more ideas for the big day in our best Thanksgiving recipes collection.
Noodle Pudding
Noodles, which routinely find themselves saved as leftovers in the back of the refrigerator, can easily be converted into dessert. Milk, butter, cinnamon and eggs combine for the custard that surrounds the cooked pasta, and the whole dish is topped with raisins. If you don’t like raisins, almost any dried fruit — cranberries or cherries, for example — would be a nice substitution.
Tangerine Sherbet
This sherbet reminds me of long-ago Creamsicles and Orange Juliuses at the mall, but it has a bright juiciness I don’t remember from my childhood.
Red Velvet Cake
This is a cake to stop traffic. The layers are an improbable red that can vary from a fluorescent pink to a dark ruddy mahogany. The color, often enhanced by a full bottle of food coloring, becomes even more eye-catching set against clouds of snowy cream cheese-mascarpone frosting or ermine (also known as boiled-milk) frosting, like a slash of glossy lipstick framed by platinum blond curls. Even the name has a vampy allure: red velvet. These days this Southern favorite is found in just about every bakery, but perhaps for a special occasion (like the very red and white Valentine’s Day) you could try your hand at baking it.
Cream Cheese-Mascarpone Frosting
Cream cheese frosting has become the go-to topping for red velvet cake. Not only do the colors provide a feast of contrast for the eyes, the creamy richness of the icing perfectly complements the deep flavor of the cake. This version calls for freshly whipped cream, cream cheese and mascarpone, which makes an impossibly satiny and cloud-like frosting that is lighter, silkier and a bit less sweet than the plain old cream cheese sort. You're going to lick the spatula clean.
Pie Crust
Some people shy away from making pie crusts. Here is a recipe to banish all fear, a simple dough of butter and all-purpose flour, easy to make and dependable as can be. If you plan to make a pie with a top crust (such as apple, cherry or blueberry), double the recipe; when it's time to chill the dough, divide it in half and shape into two disks to put in the fridge. The dough will also keep for 3 months in the freezer, if you want to stash a few disks there. Defrost in the fridge overnight.
Hazelnut Baklava
Flat-and-Chewy Chocolate-Chip Cookies
It is with great trepidation that I offer three classic recipes, hoping to suit the three schools of chocolate-chip cookiedom. (Try the crisp and gooey versions to compare.) This version is perfect for dunking in milk, and miles ahead of anything found in a plastic sleeve. Note that this recipe uses two eggs, directly between the crisp version's omission and the gooey version's use of three.
Thick-and-Gooey Chocolate-Chip Cookies
These hefty and extremely satisfying treats should be devoured with a cool glass of milk on hand. In the search for the perfect iteration of chocolate-chip cookies, three subsets of cookie rose to the top (check out the crisp and chewy versions to compare). Each recipe was tested more than a half-dozen times, so please grant us some generosity. Note that this version uses baking powder and the balls of dough are considerably larger.
Thin-and-Crisp Chocolate-Chip Cookies
Chocolate-chip cookies tend to spark the kind of tense debate usually reserved for topics like religion and politics. Opinions on various brands abound, but an excellent recipe is the key to baked good paradise. This recipe, one of three that were extensively tested, is for a golden brown emblem of cookie engineering. Note that in this crisp version the ingredients include milk and light corn syrup, and the balls of dough are quite small. This version also calls for what might seem like a lot of salt, but one tablespoon is correct. Be sure to use Diamond Crystal kosher salt, and if you use Morton's, reduce the amount by about half. (Make the chewy and gooey versions to compare.)
Rosemary Shortbread
This basic, buttery shortbread practically begs that you customize it to suit your own tastes or pantry supplies. The dough, which comes together quickly in a food processor, is already enhanced with rosemary, but nuts, seeds, citrus zest, spices, vanilla or minced dried fruit — or a combination of some of these — all make fine additions. Scale it up, scale it down. Add more salt, or use less. As long as you maintain the butter-flour ratio (one stick of butter for every cup of flour), you are free to play around. But the shortbread is delicious all on its own: tender, rich, crumbly, irresistible.
Swedish Ginger Cookies
There is little good in any Christmas cookie except the thought behind it. This may be doubly true for Swedish ginger cookies, a recipe that I have cherished for years, but I often feel it should come with a special warning. The principal ingredient in a batch of Swedish ginger cookies — the one that really does the trick — is 3/4 of a cup of bacon fat. You can never be too certain these days about what people will allow themselves to enjoy. Their ideas about what is good for them may be circumscribed by their upbringing, their religion or their proximity to a pig. However, I suspect that the Swedish cook who came up with this recipe was simply hemmed in by her larder. She had a pan of drippings and some extra sugar and spices, and she made a thin, brown cookie that tasted sweetly of smoke.
Blood-Orange Sorbet
Apple-Quince Crumble
Melon-and-Lime Parfait
Fromage Blanc Sorbet
Liz Schillinger's Shenandoah Berry Pie
Chocolate Ginger Bark With Green Tea Powder
Lemon Verbena Ice Milk With Strawberry Granita
Coffee Sauce
Poached Blood Oranges in Clementine Ratafia
Gateau Reine de Saba
Julia Child wrote that the Gateau Reine de Saba was the first French cake she ever ate. My version is a bit simpler to make than hers. I melt the chocolate with liquid, and I use all ground almonds rather than the traditional mixture of flour and almonds. I like my Reine de Saba to be slightly more like pudding and voluptuously melting. As "Reine de Saba" is French for Queen of Sheba, this seems entirely fitting. It also makes this cake eminently suitable for those who are gluten-intolerant. A little of this cake goes very far. You can easily get 12 slices out of this cake, so each person isn't consuming a huge amount of sugar. But to be defensive is to end on the wrong footing. A cake this good does you good, both body and soul.
Chocolate Cherry Mousse
This is a not-very-sweet, very grown up chocolate mousse, and it is quite easy to make. If you prefer the idea of a chocolate orange mousse, substitute Cointreau. Rum works well, too. Or you could use coffee in place of the alcohol. In any case, eating it is an example of living well.
Chocolate Guinness Cake
For me, a chocolate cake is the basic unit of celebration. The chocolate Guinness cake here is simple but deeply pleasurable, and has earned its place as a stand-alone treat.