Dessert
3846 recipes found
Frozen Fudge Pops
These easy fudge pops, with a mix of cream and milk, combine the fun of an ice cream truck Popsicle with the sophistication of a rich chocolate ice cream touched with salt. The key is making sure the ingredients are well emulsified in a blender. These will melt quickly so enjoy them right out of the freezer.
Mississippi Mud Pie
Mississippi mud pies come in all shapes and sizes: No two are exactly alike. They can have one layer, or five, and include ice cream or meringue, a flourless cake, nuts, fudge sauce and even brownie. This version, inspired by the towering beauty made by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito of Baked in Brooklyn and written about in their book, "Baked Explorations," features a graham cracker base, a dense brownie, chocolate custard and whipped cream. Needless to say, a little goes a long way. Share it with 16 to 32 of your closest friends. And a tip for serving: To ensure a clean release, give the underside and sides of the cake pan a 10-second blast with a hairdryer.
Peanut Butter Hot Fudge Sundaes
Cold, smooth ice cream, warm peanut buttery hot fudge sauce, crunchy peanuts and light, fluffy whipped cream make this sundae delicious enough for a special occasion but easy enough for a weeknight. For the richest, smoothest fudge, use a bittersweet chocolate with about 70 percent cacao and creamy peanut butter with added salt and sweeteners from brands like Skippy or Jif. You can prepare the sauce a few days in advance to make things even easier on yourself. To serve, top your favorite ice cream with the hot fudge, whipped cream, chopped salted peanuts and maraschino cherries. If you’d like to dress it up more, you can turn it into a banana split or add a few crunchy cookies.
S’mores Crispy Treats
This smile-inducing mash-up of crispy rice treats and s’mores combines the best qualities of both popular sweets. Toasty graham crackers and roasted marshmallows balance the overall sweetness, while melted butter and gooey marshmallows soften the dry graham crackers and brittle chocolate. To make these newfangled sweets, broil the marshmallows until they just start to smoke. Brown the butter to double down on the toastiness, then toss with the marshmallows, graham cereal and chocolate chips, which melt in streaks. After pressing the mixture into a pan, broil the top to get that toasted-over-the-campfire taste.
Date Bars
Native to North Africa and the Middle East, dates were planted in the Coachella Valley in the late 1890s and are now a California crop, with the state growing 90 percent of America’s dates, particularly the medjool variety. “The intense sweetness of dates makes them a great substitute for honey or sugar,” writes Tanya Holland, the chef and author of “Tanya Holland’s California Soul: Recipes From a Culinary Journey West” (Ten Speed Press, 2022). Her date bars from this cookbook feature a gorgeous strip of the beautiful fruit and make a great caky snack to serve alongside coffee or tea.
Salted Caramel Brownies
The salted caramel brownie is an ingenious combination of blond, bittersweet caramel and dark, bittersweet chocolate. Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito of New York's Baked bakeries are not the first to note the affinity of caramel and chocolate, but by emphasizing the bitter, sweet and salty notes in both, they’ve made that rare thing — a perfectly balanced bite. The bittersweetness of the caramel can be easily adjusted by cooking it less (for a milder, Kraft-like taste) or more (edgier, stronger).
Easy Chocolate Fudge
“All candy-making is about preventing crystallization,” said Michael Chu, an engineer based in Austin, Tex., who writes about his kitchen experiments online at Cooking for Engineers. Mr. Chu’s chocolate fudge recipe, of which this is an adaptation, has the pleasantly cakey, almost sandy texture desirable in fudge, which can be tricky to achieve using milk and butter. He uses condensed milk to reduce the ingredients in the fudge to a mere three (salt is optional), and to eliminate the dreaded step of cooking the sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage. “The manufacturing process has already done that work for you,” he said.
Chocolate Ganache
Ganache is the French term for the luscious combination of chocolate and cream, and it makes a strategic addition to any dessert playbook. When it’s hot and pourable, it’s a classic companion to ice cream. Warm, you can pour or pipe it over a cake, cupcakes or cookies; it will set to a soft, rich glaze. Let it cool to room temperature and whip it in a mixer to make a fluffy frosting. Or chill it, then roll into balls and dust with cocoa powder to make truffles. This sauce has a slightly more adult flavor than the ice-cream-parlor standard; coffee will do that to a dessert. Leave it out if you prefer. Also note that bittersweet chocolate will deliver a stronger, sharper chocolate taste than semi-sweet. Refrigerate leftovers in a jar; it will keep indefinitely. To rewarm, place the jar in a saucepan half-filled with simmering water, or uncover and heat in microwave at low heat.
Chocolate-Bourbon Truffles
The perfect hedonist dessert is one chocolate truffle, followed by one more. Though these look fancy, they’re actually quite simple to prepare.
Apple Pie
In 2013, one of the great pie makers in New York City was Kierin Baldwin, the pastry chef at The Dutch in the SoHo neighborhood. This recipe is adapted from hers, for a plain apple pie. It benefits from heeding her advice to pre-cook the filling before baking. “Apple pies that have crunchy, raw apples in them are a pet peeve of mine,” Ms. Baldwin said. Peel and core the fruit, cut it into slices, then macerate them in a plume of sugar. Cook these soft with a splash of acid (like lemon juice or cider vinegar) and a hint of cinnamon and allspice, then add some starch to thicken the whole. Allow the mixture to cool completely before using it in the pie. (For everything you need to know to make the perfect pie crust, visit our pie guide.)
Peach Cobbler
Some cobblers can be dry, but not this one. It puts a twist on an old-fashioned recipe, taking parts of the traditional, which uses a biscuit topping, and adding elements of a crisp, like oatmeal, for crunch. Maple syrup replaces the brown sugar usually found in peach cobbler recipes, which brings a lightly woody sweetness; nutmeg and cinnamon add that nostalgic warmth. You can use fresh or frozen peaches here — because you can and should have peach cobbler year-round — and you can even throw in a handful of blueberries, if you have them. But don’t skip the vanilla ice cream: There’s no substitute for that combination of hot and cold.
Iced Coffee Sundaes
This ice cream sundae is born of both Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá, or dark roast coffee dripped over condensed milk, and Italian affogato, or espresso poured over ice cream. Here, a sort of granita made with very strong coffee is layered with a sweetened cream mixture, and then doused in a chocolatey coffee syrup. It’s a relatively lengthy endeavor, but one well worth doing. The individual parts must be made ahead of time, so plan accordingly.
Mexican Hot Chocolate
Mesoamerican women are believed to be the first to ferment and roast cacao beans, a crucial step in chocolate making that is still used thousands of years later. Then, it was prepared as a frothy, unsweetened drink for rituals and medicinal purposes. Later, Spanish colonists brought the ingredient back to Spain, where sugar, cinnamon and vanilla were added, making it more similar to the spicy-sweet beverage we know today. This recipe is adapted from Churrería El Moro, a restaurant in Mexico City known for churros and hot chocolate. To get the signature foamy top, use a molinillo, a Mexican wooden whisk, or a wire whisk to make it light and frothy. And while it’s not traditional, you can also put the hot chocolate in a blender for about 2 minutes.
Creamy Vegan Hot Chocolate
For a vegan hot chocolate that rivals even the creamiest dairy-laden variety, add a few tablespoons of nut butter like almond, sunflower or peanut to the nondairy milk, chocolate chips and cocoa powder. Whisking is also essential here; nondairy products tend to contain stabilizers that keep them emulsified, so they can separate when boiled. If you keep whisking the mix as it heats and remove it from the stove when it’s nice and steaming, but before it boils, you’ll end up with perfectly smooth hot chocolate. Don’t worry if it breaks: You can simply blend it with a whisk or immersion blender over low heat to bring it back together.
Ingrid's Spicy Hot Chocolate
Pecan Pie Truffles
These festive truffles from Hannah Kaminsky, a columnist at VegNews Magazine, combine the rich flavors of pecan pie under a thin layer of smooth chocolate. (To make these vegan, be sure to use vegan dark chocolate.) Like traditional rum balls, these offer a slightly alcoholic kick, so be sure to monitor any underage guests.
Vegan Peach Crumble
This crumble lets peaches shine, with just a little lemon to brighten and brown sugar to help them caramelize as they soften in the oven. The crisp, toasty topping is full of texture from both nuts and oats, and is clumped in various sizes, so each bite is different from the next. Eat the crumble warm or at room temperature on its own, with a pour of nut milk or with a scoop of vegan ice cream or tart sorbet, like lemon or raspberry. Leftovers right from the fridge make a great breakfast with a spoonful of vegan yogurt.
Vegan Roasted Banana Ice Cream
A combination of coconut milk, homemade cashew milk and cocoa butter gives this dairy-free ice cream its particularly luscious, creamy texture. Ripe bananas, roasted with brown sugar and coconut oil until caramelized and golden, add a deep butterscotch-like note. You’ll need to start this at least one day before you plan to serve it. Or make it up to a week ahead. Chopped bittersweet chocolate makes a fine substitute for the walnuts, or use 1/3 cup of each.
Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
This delightful recipe, a veganized version of the legendary Times’s chocolate chip cookie, is the result of hours of research and more than 50 batches of cookies. In place of unsalted butter, this recipe calls for vegan butter, which provides plenty of flavor and just the right amount of spread. Instead of eggs, a combination of flaxseed meal and water provide structure and moisture, while granulated sugar and brown sugar — which are processed using animal products — are replaced with cane sugar and coconut sugar. Be sure to check the ingredient list on the chocolate, too: Sometimes even bittersweet bars contain dairy. The resulting cookie looks, bakes and tastes like a classic chocolate chip cookie. This recipe makes huge, bakery-style cookies, but if you want smaller cookies, use 1/4-cup mounds of dough and bake for 16 to 18 minutes, or 2-tablespoon scoops and bake for for 10 to 12 minutes.
Vegan Pumpkin Pie
The secret to this rich, creamy pumpkin pie is aquafaba, or the liquid leftover from cooked chickpeas, which is used in recipes to mimic the thickening, binding and foaming properties of egg whites. (For ease, we recommend using the liquid from canned chickpeas in this recipe.) This pie could not be simpler: Just toss everything into a blender for three minutes until it increases in volume, pour it into a prepared, unbaked pie crust, then bake until the top is crackly and ever-so-slightly jiggly in the center. Because this pie doesn't contain any eggs or dairy, once the pie is chilled and set, you can let it sit out at room temperature overnight. For longer-term storage, keep it in the refrigerator for up to a week. Serve with a dollop of vegan whipped cream.
Easy Vegan Peanut Butter-Maple Ice Cream
With a flavor like the inside of a peanut butter cup and a plush, velvety texture, this four-ingredient ice cream is one of the easiest, most satisfying dairy-free recipes of its kind. The key is to use unsweetened oat creamer as the base. Not only does it have a neutral flavor and thick texture, but its starches also help keep iciness at bay. Simmering the maple syrup to eliminate excess water is another trick to enhance creaminess, and the concentrated maple flavor is delightful. A topping of chocolate shavings or sprinkles is optional, but really drives home the peanut butter cup comparison.
Tender Almond Cake
A delightfully tender almond cake that’s quite easy to put together, this recipe is from an old friend, Salvatore Messina. Everyone adores it. Since it has some similarity to other Italian almond cakes, I naturally assumed it to be his family’s, passed down from his Sicilian grandmother. But it turned out to have no Italian storyline. Sal adapted it from a recipe for torta de Santiago, the traditional almond cake from Galicia, Spain, using less sugar, more orange zest and no cinnamon. It’s heavenly.
Cinnamon Babka
This dairy-free babka, enriched with olive oil and flavored with a ribbon of almond flour, brown sugar and cinnamon, starts with a classic challah bread dough. In the oven, the oil and sugar mingle to create a chewy, caramelized coating. You can omit the almond flour to make this nut-free, but the cinnamon ribbon will not be as pronounced. Be sure to let the babkas proof fully before baking, which will ensure a light, supple texture. (Watch Claire make this recipe on YouTube.)
Mochi Brownies
The tender crumb and slight chew of this brownie sets it apart from others. Mochiko, or sweet rice flour, is made from a short-grain rice also known as “sticky” or “glutinous” rice, and gives baked goods a unique bounce and lightness. It works particularly well in this brownie, giving a fudgy texture that is delicate yet intensely rich. This brownie comes together effortlessly, requiring just one bowl and five ingredients. Best of all, it’s also naturally gluten free.