Dessert
3848 recipes found
Classic Trifle With Berries or Citrus
Trifles are as adaptable as desserts get. As long as you have layers of cake, custard, some kind of fruit or jam, and a fluffy cloud of whipped cream on top, they make festive desserts that you can vary as much as you like. While most trifles are boozy — the cake soaked with sherry or other spirits — orange juice makes a fine alternative, especially if you pair it with syrupy sugared orange segments. Or go more traditional, and use berries and sherry. This trifle is more about the interplay of soft vanilla-scented custard, whipped cream and fruit, with only one layer of cake at the bottom of the dish. If you’d like a higher cake-to-custard ratio, add more ladyfingers as directed in Step 9. And don’t neglect the garnish. Topping the trifle with sliced almonds or amaretti lends crunch and looks pretty, too.
Salted Dark Chocolate Cake With Ganache Frosting
Layer cakes are pretty, but for many, they require far too much work to make on a regular basis. This cake, adapted from “Modern Baking: Cakes, Cookies and Everything in Between” by Donna Hay, may find a place in your recipe repertoire. It requires just two bowls — one for the cake and one for the frosting — and there’s no need to separate wet and dry ingredients. You just toss everything into a bowl and stir. The end result is a tender, sophisticated cake slathered with a glossy milk chocolate-sour cream ganache. Ms. Hay sprinkled black sea salt around the edges of her cake with stunning effect, but traditional white sea salt looks beautiful, too.
Vegan Doughnuts
Maati Kheprimeni Angaza, a professional dancer and home baker in Brooklyn, N.Y., brings her youthful energy to her Kwanzaa feast. Instead of making the time-honored offerings of bread pudding, sweet potato pie, nut-filled pound cake, and citrus-forward fruit salad, she fries festive vegan doughnuts. These airy and delicate colorful glazed desserts bridge the gap between welcoming new Kwanzaa food traditions and honoring the past.
Tahini Thumbprints Cookies With Dulce de Leche
Pleasantly bitter tahini and rich, sweet dulce de leche make a perfect pair in these charming little cookies. The tahini gives the baked dough a fudgy, halvahlike texture and flavor, and a chewiness that’s totally irresistible. Top the dulce de leche centers with a sprinkle of flaky salt for sweet-salty perfection in each bite. These cookies are also excellent filled with a dollop of raspberry jam in place of the dulce de leche.
Red Velvet Cookies With White Chocolate Chunks
As easy to make as your favorite chocolate chip recipe, these cookies pack the fun and flavor of red velvet cake into a simple, and much faster, cookie. Super sweet and tender with a slightly fudgy center, they contain creamy white chocolate chunks that nod to the snowy frosting on the cake version. For particularly pristine cookies, reserve some of the white chocolate chunks to arrange on top of the cookie, as they tend to get tinted pink when mixed into the batter.
Frozen Irish Coffee
This drink is inspired by the frozen Irish coffee served at Molly’s at the Market in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where it’s served from a frozen daiquiri machine. Freezing milk in an ice cube tray gives you a similar creamy consistency to the version at Molly’s, which contains no ice. Brandy provides a mellower flavor than Irish whiskey, but feel free to substitute whiskey for the brandy if you prefer.
Butter Tart Squares
The Junior League of Toronto called this recipe “a ‘no fuss’ treat for butter tart lovers.” Canadian butter tarts are gooey, sugary delights enjoyed year-round. For these squares, rather than make individual pastry shells, you simply pour the butter tart filling over a shortbread base. Once baked, it can be cut into squares like a bar cookie.
Banana Cream Pie No-Churn Ice Cream
This no-churn ice cream doesn’t require any cooking or special equipment. All you have to do is mash up some bananas and whip some heavy cream. The whipped cream mimics the air that’s incorporated into traditional ice cream when it’s churning in an ice cream machine. For the strongest flavor, use really, really ripe bananas; mushy, bruised ones with black peels will work well. Large crumbles of vanilla wafers stirred into the ice cream and sprinkled on top add crunch.
Apple Cobbler
The cinnamon biscuit topping in this classic cobbler is easy to make, and easily adjustable. Reduce the buttermilk by 2 tablespoons for a crumblier, more streusel-like topping, or add 2 tablespoons to make it softer and cakelike. The cobbler can be made ahead and rewarmed: Tent it with foil and warm it in a 325-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes.
Tangerine Sorbet With Sake
Even people who don’t want dessert can manage a bowl of fruit sorbet. This one is exceedingly easy, and makes a perfect ending to any meal. Made with fresh tangerine juice and a small amount sugar, the sorbet mixture needs a bit of alcohol to keep it from freezing solid. A little sake does the trick here, while a splash of sake at serving time adds interest. If you’re not a fan of sake, use flavorless vodka in the base, and a citrus-infused vodka or citrus liqueur to finish. The alcohol gives the sorbet a softer consistency, but you can omit it if you wish.
Easy No-Yeast Monkey Bread
Many monkey bread recipes are made with a yeast-risen dough, but the most classic methods use biscuit dough, as this one does. A quick fold of the dough ensures it’s light and fluffy inside. When you grease the pan, you may worry that two tablespoons of butter seems excessive, but the generous amount prevents the monkey bread from sticking to the pan and combines with the cinnamon sugar to create an effortless caramel sauce as it bakes. If you’re looking for an even simpler approach, you could replace the homemade dough with about two pounds of store-bought refrigerated biscuit dough.
Chocolate Tres Leches Cake
This recipe looks hard, but it’s not. Promise. A very easy chocolate cake is transformed into a version of tres leches cake, the classic Latin American dessert, by drenching it with evaporated milk, condensed milk and heavy cream and topping it with a lightly sweetened whipped cream. Each component of this recipe — the cake, the tres leches and the whipped cream — are all adapted from “Simple Cake: All You Need to Keep Your Friends and Family in Cake” by Odette Williams, a choose-your-own-adventure cookbook that provides you with several cake and toppings recipes that you can combine as you wish. Ms. Williams’s recipe doesn’t call for it, but adding a teaspoon of ground cinnamon to the whipped cream is a lovely addition.
Nanaimo Bars
The Nanaimo bar is a tremendously sweet, no-bake layered bar cookie from Canada made almost exclusively of packaged ingredients. The buttercream layer gets its yellow hue from custard powder, a vital ingredient that makes this a true Nanaimo bar. Use an offset spatula to give the chocolate top a surface as smooth as freshly Zambonied ice. The novelist Margaret Atwood included this recipe, from the chef Susan Mendelson, in her “Canlit Foodbook,” a fund-raising book that featured food from literature, as well as author recipes. Ms. Atwood prefers walnuts in this recipe, but any combination of walnuts, almonds or pecans will do. We’ve added a smidge more cocoa and the optional addition of salt — but leave it out for the true Nanaimo bar experience.
German Chocolate Cake
German chocolate cake is an American classic, named after a chocolatier called Samuel German (as opposed to the European nation). Milder than devil’s food cake, this chocolate cake has layers that are subtle and sweet, chocolatey but not excessively so. They create a lovely, velvet-textured vehicle for the heaps of gooey, toasted coconut and pecan custard. For more chocolate appeal, rich ganache can be slathered on the sides. This not only adds another blissful layer of chocolate, but also neatens up the look and makes for a party-worthy presentation.
Caramel-Apple Dutch Baby
This recipe makes the perfect breakfast, brunch or sweet treat for a lazy weekend. Any 10-inch ovenproof pan or baking dish will work here, but for the puffiest and crispest pancake, use a cast-iron pan. Don’t skimp on the amount of butter you melt in the pan in the first step; it prevents the pancake from sticking, and helps brown and crisp the Dutch baby while it bakes. The easy, no-fail caramel sauce infuses the apples with brown sugar and vanilla, while also serving as a syrup to drizzle over each slice. For maximum ooh and aahs, spoon the apples, caramel and all, into the center of the Dutch baby and serve it in the skillet. To keep the pancake crisp longer, serve the apples and caramel separately and allow guests to top their own.
Striped Berry Pie
You can use three jammy berry fillings — strawberry, raspberry and blackberry — to create a beautiful, naturally colored ombré effect in a pie. Pre-cooking the fillings helps ensure that they’re thick enough to easily slice once they’re baked. You need to keep a close eye on the fruit here, so don’t be tempted to make more than one filling at a time. Berries can vary in juiciness, so it’s very important to make sure you have the right amount of each filling before assembling the pie (see the Note at the bottom of the recipe for how to adjust your filling if it’s too thin or too thick). The pie is best the day it’s baked, but the fillings can be made up to 2 days ahead; stir well before using.
Blueberry Streusel Loaf Cake
Everything you love about a sweet, juicy blueberry muffin exists in this sliceable, streusel-topped loaf. Baking it at a higher temperature for the first 20 to 25 minutes helps achieve a crisp topping, while finishing it at a lower temperature helps ensure a moist center. This recipe calls for fresh blueberries, but frozen work, too. If you use frozen, don’t thaw them first, and keep in mind that they may release additional liquid during baking, which will add more color to the loaf. One final tip: Tossing the fresh or frozen berries in a little flour before stirring them into the batter helps keep them suspended so that each and every slice is evenly studded with blueberries.
Lemon Mousse for a Crowd
Apple Pie Filling
Many apple pies call for simply tossing cut apples with sugar, adding a thickening agent and some spices, and plopping it all into a crust. But precooking the apples has multiple advantages: First, it draws out some of their juices, to ensure consistency. (No undercooked apples or runny filling here!) And, second, it prevents the filling from sinking away from the crust as it cools, leaving a pocket of air between filling and crust. Use this all-purpose filling in a traditional pie, tiny hand-held pies, or in a cobbler. It can be made several days ahead, leaving just assembling and baking.
Brigadeiros
The Brazilian sweets known as brigadeiros are a classic treat at birthday parties and family get-togethers, where the fudgy, chocolate-milk caramels are often rolled in sprinkles. The chef Natalia Pereira of Woodspoon in Los Angeles also makes more grownup, bittersweet brigadeiros by rolling them in cocoa powder or shredded coconut. Try her recipe, which she learned from her mother in Minas Gerais, Brazil, using either canned condensed milk or a homemade version. Either way, the candies will be tender and delicious.
Chocolate Truffle Tart
This special occasion dessert takes a little time to put together, but it's much easier to make than it looks. It starts with a simple press-in chocolate cookie crust that doesn’t require a rolling pin or chilling. The crust is filled with dark chocolate ganache and a layer of milk chocolate truffles. The truffles can be finished simply with cocoa powder, or coated in finely chopped nuts, powdered sugar or a colorful, tart powder made by crushing freeze-dried fruit. (Or you can skip the truffle recipe entirely and instead use store-bought truffles.) This is the moment to splurge on high-quality chocolate, as you’ll taste it in the final result. Don’t be tempted to use chocolate chips, as the added stabilizers make it difficult to achieve a shiny, creamy ganache. For picture-perfect slices, dip your knife in warm water before each cut and wipe it dry after.
Vegan Pie Crust
Shortening replaces butter in this vegan version of traditional pie dough. Because shortening has a higher melting temperature than butter, you can prepare the dough without any sticky disasters. It also bakes into a beautifully tender and not-at-all-soggy crust. When shopping for a shortening, look for one made with coconut oil, palm oil or a combination of the two.
Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies
Almond flour is the only special ingredient needed to make these cookies, and it can be found in the baking aisle or the health food section of the grocery store. It provides the protein and structure of a classic wheat flour, while keeping the cookie perfectly chewy in the center. If you want a stronger almond flavor, toast the almond flour in a dry skillet over medium-low heat until golden and fragrant, and cool before using. This recipe was adapted from the Times’s famous chocolate chip cookie recipe, but unlike that recipe, this dough does not require 36 hours of refrigeration before baking. Chopped chocolate or feves make for a gooier cookie, but classic chocolate chips work here, too. 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 a 2-tablespoon scoops and bake for for 10 to 12 minutes.
Blueberry Pie Filling
The scent of blueberry pie bubbling away in the oven is comforting and familiar, especially in high summer, when pie baking can become a daily event. But just imagine that summery smell, and taste, in deepest winter. This pie filling, which uses cornstarch as a thickener, has a shelf life of about nine months, so the best of summer can be yours in the winter, too.