Dessert
3842 recipes found
Chocolate Birthday Cake Butter Mochi
Sprinkles always bring joy to a cake, but add Pop Rocks and you have a celebration, complete with a mini fireworks show. This recipe from the chef Sheldon Simeon and Garrett Snyder’s 2021 book, “Cook Real Hawai‘i,” takes chocolate butter mochi to the max with a creamy peanut butter topping and lots and lots of candy. Add the Pop Rocks just before serving; the candy has a tendency to ping off as it reacts with the moisture in the frosting. The butter mochi is best the day it is made, but will keep a couple of days covered in the refrigerator.
Salted Apricot-Honey Cobbler
Unlike most cobblers, which ask you to chop or slice the fruit, this one is meant to preserve the integrity of the apricots, which bake until totally tender, jammy and saucy, while still maintaining their shape and texture. The idea is to spoon out one of the barely sweetened, oaty shortcakes from the pan and then top it with the roasted, honey-sweetened fruit. Ice cream is optional but recommended.
Strawberry Spoon Cake
This unfussy cake with a top layer of jammy strawberries is so gooey it’s best to serve the whole thing with a spoon. The batter comes together quickly with minimal effort, using basic pantry ingredients and a small handful of berries — frozen or fresh. If you’re using frozen, be sure to defrost them in the microwave first. Extract as much juice as possible from the fruit by macerating and mashing it, so that it lends the cake additional moisture while baking. Add a dash of freshly ground cardamom or ground ginger on top before baking it off, if you like, or some ribbons of fresh basil once it’s hot out of the oven. Whatever embellishments you decide on, burrowing warm spoonfuls of this cake beside scoops of vanilla ice cream is the most important thing.
Cinnamon Apple Sheet Cake
This simple cake is studded with large pieces of fruit, so that each slice has its own piece of tender baked apple. Press the apples gently into the batter and be aware that the pound cake-style batter will rise around them. The cake is sweet enough that it needs no frosting, and is finished simply with a dusting of cinnamon-scented confectioners’ sugar that dissolves onto the surface of the apples, leaving only its sweetness behind. Cut the cake into 12 large squares and serve with ice cream, or cut the squares in half for a sweet snack.
Brookies
Why just eat a chocolate chip cookie when you could marry it with a dense, fudgy brownie? You do have to make two different batters, but each is whipped up in the same pot without any fancy equipment. You can swirl the two batters together to see both elements at first glance, or simply pour one on top of the other and create a surprise second layer. Either way, make sure to shower the top with extra chocolate.
Supernatural Brownies
This recipe is an accidental creation by Nick Malgieri, who (in a rare human moment for a pastry chef) once forgot to double the flour when baking his own fudge brownie recipe. He also adds a measure of brown sugar to the basic formula. The experts are divided as to whether the brown sugar actually contributes flavor or simply makes the brownie moister (molasses, which makes brown sugar brown, is powerfully hydrophilic). It’s my belief that the slightly bitter taste of molasses acts as an invisible enhancer to the chocolate. The result is as complex and sophisticated as any terrine or truffle I have ever produced.
Rice Krispies Treats With Chocolate and Pretzels
Marshmallow treats can skew saccharine, but this slightly more sophisticated version embraces the salty as much as it does the sugary. Sweet marshmallows and chocolate are balanced by plenty of salt: in the butter, on the pretzels and in the flaky sea salt finish. Butter-flavored pretzels (“butter snaps”) have a delicate crunch and a creamy note that work well in this recipe, but any small, thin pretzels are also good. You'll want to use chopped chocolate here instead of chips: They melt faster, so you end up with smeared chocolate bits instead of distinctive chunks.
Lemon Sheet Cake With Buttercream Frosting
This pleasantly zesty lemon cake is baked in a standard 9-by-13-inch pan, no layering or trimming required, and is easy enough to bake on a weekday. Cover the cake with casual swoops of fluffy lemon buttercream for the perfect teatime or anytime treat.
Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake
With just a 9-by-13 pan, a spoon and four store-bought ingredients, you can make an ice cream cake that’s creamy, crunchy and fudgy in every bite. It starts with crushed chocolate-mint cookies that are covered with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Next, it’s topped with a layer of ice cream sandwiches, with their cakey cookies and vanilla ice cream. Follow that with more mint chip ice cream, and you’ve made a six-layer cake without breaking a sweat. Feel free to experiment here: Swap out the mint cookies for snickerdoodles, pretzels or broken waffle cones, and the mint-chip ice cream for coffee, peanut butter or strawberry ice cream — or any combination that sounds good to you. Slice the cake into pieces big or small, then drizzle them with hot fudge or Magic Shell. This cake serves a crowd, but you can halve the ingredients and build it in an 8-by-8-inch pan for a smaller group.
Pumpkin Sheet Cake With Molasses Cream-Cheese Frosting
This simple, warmly spiced pumpkin cake is enough to feed a crowd, making it a perfect holiday treat. It's also relatively versatile: You can serve it in the pan for an easy presentation, or transfer it to a platter for something a little more refined. The frosting is just enough to coat the cake in a thin layer, but, if you want more, you may want to more for a generous coating. And, for a more subtly flavored frosting, substitute an equal amount of dark maple syrup for the molasses, or skip the molasses entirely for pure cream-cheese flavor.
Strawberry Slab Pie
On Juneteenth, which celebrates the abolition of slavery in the United States, the picnic table overflows with summertime pies and red foods, a symbol of perseverance. That makes this festive strawberry slab pie ideal for Juneteenth, though it’d be welcome anytime in berry season. The rectangular pie is made in a quarter sheet pan; if you don't have one, use a comparably sized casserole dish. Cracked black pepper in the crust and fresh ginger in the filling add a bit of spice. This isn't an especially sugary dessert, so if you want something sweeter, top it with vanilla ice cream.
Chewy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars
While most pumpkin cookies skew cakey, these bars are as rich and chewy as the center of a chocolate chip cookie. To counteract the added moisture from the pumpkin purée, this recipe has a few tricks up its sleeve: For starters, it completely ditches the eggs. Browning the butter does double duty, removing water while also giving the dough a deeper flavor with nutty notes. Baking the bars at a low temperature keeps the edges soft, resulting in an impossibly chewy cookie texture with a warm pumpkin spice flavor and pockets of molten chocolate.
Tres Leches Cake
Tres leches, which means “three milks” in Spanish, refers to the whole milk, condensed milk and evaporated milk that make up a creamy soaking sauce for the baked cake. Over time, it saturates the cake, making it soft and luscious. While a thick garnish of softly whipped cream may seem excessive, it actually tempers the sweetness of the whole confection. Serve with some berries or sliced fruit to complete the presentation.
Plum Cobbler Bars
What's not to love about a juicy plum filling surrounded by plenty of buttery streusel? In this simple recipe, you have to cook down the plums to be thick enough, but the process is relatively hands off, and the flavor of the slow-simmered fruit is well worth it. You can cut the cobbler easily into bars, as the name implies, but the filling stays a bit soft, so you may prefer to eat them with a fork. They're excellent with ice cream, but many like them best topped with a drizzle of cold heavy cream.
Spicy Ginger Applesauce Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting
This simple sheet cake is packed with three kinds of spicy ginger: fresh, ground and crystallized. The cake is delicious on its own, but cream cheese frosting and a sprinkle of crystallized ginger push it closer to dessert. The cake can be made a day in advance, covered and refrigerated and brought to room temperature before serving. The crystallized ginger should be sprinkled on just before serving as it will weep in the fridge.
Caramelized Banana Pudding
This crowd-pleasing Southern dessert created by layering vanilla pudding, vanilla wafers and bananas is adapted from Millie Peartree, the owner of Millie Peartree Fish Fry & Soul Food restaurant in the Bronx. Her version takes it over the top by caramelizing the bananas with a little melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla before layering. This extra step adds complex flavor to the unapologetically sweet dessert. Serve piles of it in bowls with extra wafers crumbled over the top, a sprinkle of cinnamon and unsweetened whipped cream, if desired.
Rocky Road Ice Cream Bars
This recipe takes the classic American ice cream and turns it into simple, festive bars. They start with a no-bake chocolate cookie crust that gets topped with chocolate ice cream, salty toasted nuts and, of course, mini marshmallows, making this a treat everyone will love. Using a rich, dense ice cream is key to these bars, so buy a premium ice cream for this recipe if you can, since some supermarket versions may have a lot of air incorporated. Serve the bars straight from the freezer (with napkins!) or on dessert plates with a drizzle of hot fudge sauce, and watch them disappear.
No-Bake Chocolate Mousse Bars
Ethereal and ready to melt in your mouth, chocolate mousse bars are easy to make and even easier to eat. With so few ingredients, it’s important to use a chocolate you would be perfectly happy to snack out of hand. The instant espresso powder is optional but adds depth to this simple dessert. To cut beautiful, neat slices, use a long sharp knife warmed in hot water and wiped clean before each cut.
Seis Leches Cake
This recipe for a tres leches cake (a traditional syrup-soaked confection from Latin America) takes a good thing — namely the combination of milks that saturate its crumb — and doubles it. Instead of just the usual three milks (sweetened condensed, evaporated and heavy cream), it calls for six, adding coconut milk, condensed coconut milk and dulce de leche. Like the original version, it’s a dense, puddinglike cake flavored with cinnamon and rum. But here, notes of coconut and caramel lend complexity and even more richness. Serve this in small squares, preferably with a bitter espresso or some tea to sip between syrupy bites.
No-Bake Cheesecake Bars
No-bake cheesecake is an excellent dessert for cooks with a lot of friends and not a lot of time. Unlike a traditional cheesecake, the no-bake variety is eggless, making it smooth, light, and all about the dairy. This version includes tangy Greek yogurt and a bit of whipped cream for added loft. Serve big squares with in-season fresh fruit or a dollop of fresh jam.
Vegan Brownies With Tahini and Halvah
It was said that the recipient of the very first batch of these brownies polished them off, alone, in one sitting. There is no proof of this. What we do know is that they are vegan, deeply dark and fudgy. The recipe, which is based on one in Amy Chaplin's cookbook, “At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen,” uses everyday ingredients to reach that fudginess: olive oil (a proven amplifier of chocolate’s complexity) and dates (to round out the bitterness of the cocoa powder, and to act as a binder). But tahini and halvah are the two surprise players here, taking the recipe in a rich direction. The tahini disappears into the brownies, making them shockingly moist, while the halvah lends something familiar and unexpected. Regular almonds are fine; Marconas are better. You could replace the spelt flour with all-purpose for a less savory, more traditional effect.
Yellow Sheet Cake With Chocolate Frosting
This is the kind of dessert worth dreaming about: a buttery yellow cake topped with a chocolate-sour cream frosting, made doubly rich with cocoa powder and melted chocolate. The batter may seem thin when you spread it in the pan, but, once baked, it rises to perfection. It’s not a towering, lofty cake — it’s not meant to be — but when it’s covered with a generous layer of frosting, it makes for the ideal cake-to-icing ratio. For a perfect cake, make sure designated “room temperature” ingredients truly are; this helps ensure that the batter is fully incorporated so the cake bakes evenly.
Lemon Sheet Cake With Raspberry Whipped Cream
This lovely cake was inspired by the colors and flavors of pink lemonade. Don’t be tempted to skip the first step of this recipe, which asks you to rub lemon zest into granulated sugar: The sugar granules help release the essential oils in the zest, making for a brighter lemon flavor and fragrance. (If you’re really short on time, you can skip using your hands and just mix with the paddle attachment inside the mixer bowl on low speed for 1 minute.) Slather this sunny cake with swoopy, easy-to-make raspberry whipped cream then serve as is, or dressed up with lemon zest or sprinkles.
Chess Pie Squares
These heavenly little bars, adapted from the Southern cookbook author Julia Reed, are a modern-day, perfect-for-a-picnic version of a traditional custard pie made from flour, cornmeal, sugar, eggs, butter and buttermilk. They are like lemon bars without the lip-puckering citrus: a blanket of egg-rich custard generously laced with vanilla atop a lightly salted, crumbly shortbread crust. (If you don't have buttermilk, you can make an easy substitute by combining one tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice with a cup of milk. Let stand for 5 minutes, then measure out 3/4 cup.)