Dessert
3848 recipes found
Chocolate Kolbasa (Russian No-Bake Fudge Cookies)
The chef Bonnie Morales Frumkin upgraded this recipe from a treat her Russian family often made during the Soviet era as a way to stretch precious supplies like cookies and cocoa powder. By adding bittersweet chocolate and toasted hazelnuts, she has made it positively luxurious. The treat gets its name from its resemblance to a salami, with bits of nuts and cookies studding each slice.
Hazelnut, Pear and Cardamom Tart
This is an elegant alternative to the holiday parade of sugary pies. Cardamom adds a grown-up twist to the classic combination of hazelnut and pear. (Don’t overdo the spice, however, or your dessert will taste more like a cold remedy than a treat.) Cut corners by pressing out the crust, but don’t skip making your own roasted hazelnut meal: The deep, caramel flavor of toasted nuts is worth the labor. Use ripe pears, or poach harder fruit until tender before adding to the tart.
Raspberry Cream Pie
Here's a pie for the middle of summer, when the raspberries are ripe and dessert should be cool and creamy. Think of it as vanilla pudding in a pie shell, a messily delicious way to showcase the flavor of fresh raspberries. Ruth P. Casa-Emellos, The Times's home economist, developed this recipe in the summer of 1952. It was published as French raspberry pie but later appeared in the recipe booklet “Fruit Pies: Delightful Confections Starring Fresh Fruits” as raspberry cream pie. We’ve made the red currant jelly optional. If you choose to include it, you’ll get a gemlike glow and a crust-and-jam combination reminiscent of a homemade Pop-Tart.
Stone Fruit and Frangipane Toast
Juicy, late-summer fruits and rich almond frangipane do the hard work here. Consider making these toasts an exercise in generosity rather than technique: Spread frangipane thickly and all the way to the edges of the toast and err on the side of too much fruit, torn roughly and tossed with a pinch of salt, and some sugar to encourage caramelization. If serving this for an after-dinner dessert, add a splash of red wine to the fruit and serve with a dollop of mascarpone. If this is breakfast, you might prefer Greek yogurt as an accompaniment, or a glug of heavy cream.
Banana Paletas
Throughout Mexico, paletas are made with fresh fruit and not much sugar, pretty much the opposite of commercial sorbets and sherbets sold here. Like sorbet or sherbet, these frozen snacks are easily made at home; all you need is a set of plastic molds, sold in many supermarkets, toy stores and online. For a lower-tech solution, you can use small paper cups and insert wooden sticks in them once the mixture freezes hard enough to support them. The dairy is optional. Adding it produces a paleta de leche, which has a more distinctive texture than the dairy-free paleta de agua, which is icier.
Chocolate-Chip Cookie Pizza
You like chocolate chip cookies. You like pizza. What could be better than a giant chocolate chip pizza cookie? If your answer is, “pretty much nothing,” we’d say you’re 100% right. This Instagram-worthy treat starts with a batch of our famous chocolate chip cookie dough (with a smidge of cornstarch to keep the cookie soft and gooey in the center), but from there, it’s all yours. When we took it out of the oven, we spread on cherry jam “pizza sauce,” drizzled on melted white chocolate “mozzarella,” and added rounds of raspberry fruit leather “pepperoni.” But warmed Nutella and blobs of marshmallow fluff are a pretty awesome combination, too. We developed this recipe for a special print-only edition of The New York Times for Kids, but our sources tell us grown-up sweet tooths can't resist this oversized treat either. For a more sophisticated dinner party-worthy variation, leave off the toppings and serve generous wedges with scoops of vanilla ice cream and salted caramel sauce.
Rosemary-Honey Almond Tart
In this stunning tart, a gently set custard studded with sliced almonds is baked in a buttery shortbread crust. It is as fit as a dinner-party dessert as it is daytime sweet to accompany cups of warm tea or coffee. The honey in the custard is steeped with rosemary, but other fresh herbs, such as marjoram, tarragon and thyme, can be substituted to add a nice savory hint to the floral syrup. You can do several steps ahead of time, or the whole tart can be prepared and baked, then cooled, wrapped and stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days or in the freezer for up to 1 month.
Coconut Macaroons
If you are a coconut lover, you’ll want to make these moist, chewy macaroons all the time. Crisp on the outside and pillowy within, they take only a few minutes to put together and keep extremely well. Their perfect texture comes from fluffy sweetened coconut for softness and crunchier unsweetened coconut for more chewiness. Coconut flour, ubiquitous now because of gluten-free baking, is very absorbent and works beautifully to absorb the extra liquid that would otherwise run out of the macaroon, but matzo cake meal can be used during Passover and all-purpose flour any other time of year. Just double check that whatever you use is kosher for Passover.
Strawberry and Sesame Swirl Soft Serve
Strawberries and cream get a double dose of sesame from tahini and halvah. The tahini adds richness, and the slightly salty halvah has a cookie-dough effect: Everyone will mine for it. Eat it quickly before it melts, ideally with extra halvah on standby.
Bananas Foster Poundcake
Named after a customer at Brennan’s restaurant in New Orleans, bananas Foster is traditionally served over vanilla ice cream or over pound cake. But what if we told you that you could have your bananas Foster baked into cake and glazed with that same sauce? This slightly dense, buttery cake is delicious warm, and super moist. Take care when flambéing — keep a lid nearby to smother any flames — or skip it altogether: Bypass adding the alcohol in Step 3 and simply reduce the sauce on the stovetop. And don’t forget to add that scoop of ice cream and a dollop of fresh whipped cream. You’ll thank us later.
Chocolate Satin Frosting
Blueberry-Ginger Clafoutis
One of the most wonderful ways to celebrate fresh (and, in this case, even frozen) fruit, clafoutis originated in the Limousin region of France. Here, a small part of the batter is baked in the baking dish, then the berries, ginger and the rest of the batter is layered on top to prevent the blueberries from sinking and burning. For maximum lemon flavor, zest the lemon over the batter in Step 3. You can substitute any type of fresh fruit — berries, grapes, or cherries; just remember to adjust the amount of sugar you add accordingly.
Coconut-Lemongrass Tapioca With Caramelized Citrus
Bouncy tapioca pearls, made from cassava, a West African staple, are paired with a soothing coconut-lemongrass broth and caramel-coated citrus slices. The fruit can easily be substituted with whatever is in season, such as raw persimmons, poached pears or caramelized apples. The crushed pistachios are optional but add a welcome pop of crunch and color. Serve as a comforting dessert or a casual midday snack.
Chocolate Cupcakes With Cream Filling
Here is a homemade take on the Hostess Cupcake, the sweet, well-preserved treat that was lost, for a while, to the wilds of bankruptcy. They take a little time to make, but are well worth it. (Don’t skimp on the Marshmallow Fluff!) Wrapping the finished items individually in cellophane allow eaters to experience the twinkly crinkle of childhood afternoons spent carefully removing the chocolate frosting from the cupcake’s top. But these are decidedly not the original. Whatever you do, make sure they’re stored in something airtight. They will dry out quickly.
Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts
These fuss-free (no electric mixer needed!) pumpkin doughnuts are flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg, classic spices we associate with fall. But they’re also loaded with pumpkin pureé, which makes them moist and flavorful and gives them their orangey hue. They’re finished with a simple — and forgiving — vanilla glaze that sets beautifully. If your glaze is too thick to dip, just add a little more milk. If your glaze is too thin and runs off the doughnut, add a little more confectioners’ sugar.
Apricot Upside-Down Cake
Apricot halves, baked in a faux caramel of melted butter, brown sugar and spices, burst with punchy flavor in every bite of this cake. The sticky topping complements the almost-tart, fleshy stone fruit, and offers a textural contrast to the buttery cake. A hint of almond further accentuates the apricot flavor. This rustic beauty is perfect by itself, but you can serve it with whipped cream or ice cream, if you want to be fancy.
White Chocolate Glaze
King Cake
This Carnival cake is more like a brioche, with a bitingly sweet frosting and sugared pecans for crunch. Browse the baby shower section of a party supply store for the Mardi Gras king cake baby, where plastic babies are often sold by the dozen. A large dried bean works too. Tradition dictates that whoever finds the baby is king or queen of the party (and also has to bring the king cake to the next Carnival celebration).
Fudge
Sephardic-Style Macaroons
Chocolate Macaroons
Classic Cheesecake
If there’s one dessert that would least benefit from innovation, it would have to be New York-style cheesecake. No tricks, no twists; Just a crumbly graham cracker crust and lots of lightly sweetened cream cheese. Baking a cheesecake without a water bath might seem like you're tempting fate, but if you do so at a low enough temperature, it will cook the filling gently and evenly without the risk of curdling or scorching. While cracks on the cheesecake's surface won’t affect the taste, they can be unsightly and are most likely to occur when there’s a sudden temperature change (say, from the oven to the fridge). To reduce the chances of cracking, let the cheesecake rest in the oven a few minutes before transferring to the counter to cool completely.
No-Bake Blueberry Cheesecake Bars
There are those who may not find this sweet enough, and if that’s the case I recommend adding a quarter cup or so of sugar instead of increasing the honey, because you don’t want the honey flavor to become overpowering. Other flavor possibilities to add with the blueberries: any citrus you like; a teaspoon or so of very finely ground coffee or cocoa; or chopped raisins or, I suppose, chocolate chips. I prefer the straight honey-lemon combination, unadulterated.
Walnut Tart
If you seek inspiration for a better pie, you need look no further than a traditional French walnut tart. It is only marginally different, but vive that difference. The reason is butter: butter in the crust and butter in the filling. Oh, and cream in the filling, too. If they had pecans in France I’m sure they would use them, as you could in this recipe.