Dessert
3848 recipes found
Sponge Cake
The streamlined mixing technique for this versatile cake, which is leavened with only eggs, borrows from génoise, chiffon cake and a style of roll cakes popular in Asian bakeries. The result is an airy, light-as-a-feather texture that’s also moist, thanks to the addition of oil. Bake it in a jelly roll pan to create a roulade, or in a 9-inch springform pan for a layer cake, but don’t use a nonstick pan, as the cake will collapse. The 9-inch cake needs nothing more than a little whipped cream on top. Any kind of macerated fruit would be perfect, but ultimately a bonus. (Watch Claire make this cake and two others on YouTube.)
Classic Kouign-Amann
A yeast-risen pastry with soft layers, deep buttery flavor and a chewy, caramelized top, this recipe, adapted from Nicolas Henry of the Montreal patisserie Au Kouign-Amann, celebrates the classic Breton kouign-amann, traditionally made as a round skillet cake and served as slices. There’s no shortcut and no substitute for the repetition needed to perfect this pastry. But you are in good hands: The process is a series of simple steps, with plenty of opportunities to make ahead. And the results of your efforts are sure to please, whether it accompanies your morning coffee, serves as a delightful afternoon snack or stunningly ends a meal. You’ll need an oven-safe nonstick skillet for this cake. A cast-iron skillet will work, but will produce a deeper, more caramelized result.
Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies
These two-bite treats are for anyone who loves the combination of chocolate and hazelnuts. Hidden beneath a crunchy topping of toasted nuts is a dollop of chocolate hazelnut spread, which oozes like the middle of a molten lava cake when a cookie is served warm. For the creamiest centers, drop or pipe teaspoonfuls of the chocolate hazelnut spread on a parchment paper-lined pan and freeze until firm. Press those frozen mounds into the centers of the raw cookie dough rounds and bake. Whether you do that or simply drop the spread straight from the jar (as instructed below), you’ll end up with crackly-edged, fudgy cookies.
Salted Caramels
Despite being primarily made of sugar, these soft caramels are wonderfully complex in flavor, as the sugar is cooked to a deep amber before fresh dairy is added and the mixture cooked again. Infusing the cream with coffee is optional, but it lends a pleasant bitterness to the candies.
Chocolate Soufflés
While soufflés are delicate and sensitive creations, they're also fundamentally simple, consisting of a flavored base that's lightened with beaten egg whites. The keys to success are beating the egg whites properly so they're stable and voluminous, working quickly to prevent their collapse, and thoroughly greasing the ramekins so the mixture can rise unencumbered in the oven.
Gingerbread Latte Cookies
Biting into one of these cookies is like taking the first sip of a festive beverage, and their spiced coffee fragrance gives your kitchen cozy holiday vibes. A combination of fresh and ground ginger adds an extra note of warmth that accentuates the coffee flavor and other spices, while the espresso-sugar coating creates crisp edges that yield to pillowy-soft interiors. Pair it with your milk of choice and you have a gingerbread latte in a single bite.
Nougat With Honey and Pistachios
Nougat is not exactly for the faint of heart: Preparing it involves heating honey and a sugar syrup separately to different temperatures and streaming them into beaten egg whites in rapid succession. Make sure you have all of your ingredients ready before you start cooking, and the reward is a candy unlike any other with a snow-white color, fresh honey flavor and lots of toasted pistachios to temper the sweetness and add crunch.
Chewy Gingerbread Cookies
This gingerbread is maxed out on spice, packed with two types of fiery ginger and lots of prickly black pepper. Cozy from all the warm spices as well as from molasses, they’re perfect for munching on while tree-trimming. The center of the cookie is fudgy and dense, while the outside edges stay crisp — like the best brownie, but in gingerbread form. That chewy-crispy texture is thanks to the confectioners’ sugar in the dough and a light coating of ginger-spiced sugar. Be sure to use true molasses and not blackstrap molasses; blackstrap molasses has less sugar, more salt and acidity, and can change the way the dough browns, spreads and interacts with the leavening.
Minty Lime Bars
These rich yet refreshing lime bars are for citrus lovers who appreciate puckering acidity in their desserts. The curd filling contains a bit of cornstarch, so it sets firmly in the oven, allowing you to slice, stack and store the bars easily. A little fresh mint inside the shortbread crust — which is made entirely by hand — adds an herbal complement to the lime.
Peppermint Brownie Cookies
Brownies can be contentious. You may be an edge person or someone who loves middle pieces, a fudgy fanatic or a cakey purist. These cookies will please all brownie lovers, with chewy edges, tender centers and crunch from crushed peppermint candies. While any unsweetened cocoa powder will work in this recipe, Dutch-processed cocoa will make the cookies taste more chocolaty and round out their peppermint flavor. Whisking the eggs and sugars for a long time may seem fussy, but this process gives the cookie body, makes the batter easier to scoop and ensures a shiny top, the hallmark of any good brownie.
Chocolate Burfi
Burfi is a very sweet Indian candy — similar to fudge, but slightly earthier and more milky — that is typically made with some combination of milk, sugar, ghee and flavorings. In Indian culture, burfi is often given as a gift, accompanying any kind of celebration: a birthday, a holiday, even a simple get-together of friends. This recipe, adapted from Raja Sweets in Houston, caters to those looking for an accessible entry point to the world of burfi; it offers a slight variation on the basic formula by adding a layer of cocoa-infused khoya (the name for the milky base).
Chocolate Fudge
Fudge can be fickle, easily becoming grainy and hard if it’s beaten too much or if the sugar mixture crystallizes, the result of undissolved sugar crystals. Try to make fudge in a cool environment that is not humid, and, if the final texture isn’t quite what you desire, know that cooking the fudge at a temperature that’s a few degrees lower the next time will result in a softer fudge, while a few degrees higher will make it firmer. Fudge also dries out easily, so make sure it’s well wrapped.
Pistachio Bundt Cake
If you’ve never been a fan of Bundt cake, this one just might change your mind. The key to this cake’s moist crumb and sweet, nostalgic flavor is instant pistachio pudding mix, a trick that the chef Joshua Pinsky learned from his mother. A simple lime glaze and whipped ricotta for dolloping make this recipe feel more special than your average snacking cake. This also works well as a make-ahead dessert, retaining its moisture and flavor over a few days. Try making the whipped ricotta a day ahead: It’ll thicken and become even creamier overnight.
Sunset Pavlova With Sweet Vinegar and Rosemary
A Pavlova is among the best desserts to serve at a dinner party, as it brings the wow factor but is also very forgiving. If the meringue cracks in places, you don’t need to fuss as you’ll be covering it with cream and fruit. You can play with the flavoring of the cream and change up the fruits. If you can’t find kumquats, feel free to swap them out for muscat or green seedless grapes, or an orange, peeled and sliced into rounds. You can make the meringue base up to two days in advance, as long as you let it cool completely before storing in an airtight container. Keep it in the coolest part of your kitchen, away from direct sunlight, to avoid any humidity.
Lemon Cakes
In the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series (later known on television as “Game of Thrones”), George R.R. Martin devotes a lot of ink to lemon cakes, a favorite of the Lady of Winterfell Sansa Stark. The cakes have since become a pop culture totem for fans of the series. This recipe is inspired by a version found in “A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook” by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer. You don’t need to be a fan of “Game of Thrones” to love these cookielike treats, which are dense in texture, bright in flavor and boast a tart-sweet lemon glaze. The cakes are easy to throw together for a potluck or to satisfy a teatime craving.
Eggnog Snickerdoodles
These pillowy, festive cookies are great to have in your back pocket when you’re in the mood for a quick holiday treat. Rum extract, widely available during the holidays, is the secret to replicating that classic eggnog flavor. An extra egg yolk in the dough and a dusting of nutmeg-sugar yield a cookie that’s custard-like on the inside and crisp on the outside. These are even better the second day, and keep very well in an airtight container at room temperature. This season, forgo the eggnog altogether and enjoy these cookies with a bourbon neat. (Watch Vaughn Vreeland make his Eggnog Snickerdoodles.)
Saffron-Ginger Pears
For a stellar dessert, poach pears and let them steep in a bright yellow saffron-ginger syrup. With saffron, a little goes a long way: A quarter teaspoon will not break the bank. Prepare these days ahead of serving and store them in their syrup; they’ll only improve in flavor. Served chilled with a dab of crème fraîche or a scoop of vanilla ice cream, this dessert is sheer luxury.
Brown Sugar Roulade With Burnt Honey Apples
If the flavors of winter could be rolled into one, then this meringue roulade would be the result: Warming cinnamon, burnt honey, sweet apples and tangy orange come together to make a dessert fit for the festive season. Make sure all your individual components have completely cooled before assembling, as you don’t want to create any excess moisture in the roulade. Get ahead by making the apples and cream the day before, then keeping them refrigerated until needed. Feel free to make this roulade your own by swapping out pears for apples, cardamom for cinnamon or more whipping cream for mascarpone. So long as you stick to the basic technique, the flavors are yours to play with.
Peanut Laddoo Buckeye Balls
Here’s a simple, no-bake sweet that riffs on peanut laddoos, a bite-size Indian confection made of ghee, sugar and nuts, with a chocolate coating inspired by buckeyes, the peanut butter and chocolate treat popular in Ohio. It was dreamed up by Hetal Vasavada, the blogger and author of the dessert cookbook “Milk & Cardamom,” which combines the traditional Indian flavors she grew up with and the Western sweets she encountered as an American kid in New Jersey. The cardamom, ghee and jaggery provide both an interesting twist to the traditional flavor combination and a slightly grittier texture, which Ms. Vasavada likens to that of a Butterfinger candy bar.
One-Day Fruitcake
Though this cake requires you to soak dried fruit overnight in a mixture of rum and orange juice, allowing it to become plump and soft and flavorful, before you assemble the batter, it’s exceedingly faster (and every bit as delicious) as a traditional fruitcake that takes weeks to age. For the best flavor, use the highest-quality dried fruit you can find.
Dutch Baby
This large, fluffy pancake is excellent for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dessert any time of year. And it comes together in about five blessed minutes. Just dump all of the ingredients into a blender, give it a good whirl, pour it into a heated skillet sizzling with butter, and pop it into the oven. Twenty-five minutes later? Bliss. It's wonderful simply with sugar, syrup or preserves, but you also can serve it with fresh berries and whipped cream, apple slices cooked in butter and sugar or banana slices lightly cooked then dusted with brown sugar.
Chocolate Church Cake
Layer cakes are formative for Southerners: They grace wedding tables, shiva gatherings, quinceañeras, baptisms and funerals. Because of this — and because layer cakes may be as close as some will ever get to a holy experience — they’re often called church cakes. This chocolate one is a perfectly moist and stacked rendition of a pudding cake, with just the right amount of richness from the frosting. This formula needs no alterations, but there’s no sense in breaking the tradition of Southern bakers, who personalize recipes as a point of pride. Add pulverized praline to the center, or cinnamon or instant-coffee granules to the batter. Don’t be afraid to make it your own. To make it a true church cake, serve it to those you hold in the highest regard, for celebrations or to simply indulge in the good glory of company.
Chocolate Chile Biscotti
The word “biscotti” comes from the Latin biscoctus, or twice cooked: The dough is rolled into logs and given a spell in the oven, then cooled, sliced and slotted back in to bake a little more. The second turn in the oven essentially sucks them dry and gives them that signature crunch. Too much crunch, however, and they can be a little flinty. The pastry chef Mark Sopchak makes biscotti that are shorter and narrower — “Biscottini!” an Italian passerby once said — and ever so slightly softer, with the addition of butter. These cookies are thin enough to snap smartly under the teeth and then obligingly crumble. Inspired in part by Mexican mole, they have a touch of creaminess from cashews and a wild streak of chile powder, just enough to make you hum.
Blueberry Poppy Seed Cake
This simple one-bowl recipe highlights blueberries and poppy seeds in a fluffy vanilla- and almond-scented batter that comes together in a flash. It travels well, which makes it a perfect picnic dessert or beach snack, and it’s just as good for breakfast the next day. The combination of butter and oil gives the cake great flavor, but, more important, keeps it moist for days on the counter. For those who are not fans of almond extract, feel free to leave it out and replace it with more vanilla extract.