Dessert
3903 recipes found
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.
Chocolate Glaze
Chez Panisse’s Blueberry Cobbler
This cobbler, which comes from the kitchens of Chez Panisse, prizes the berries above all, using only 1/3 cup of sugar. The dough rounds for the top are placed so they don’t cover all the berries, and the juice from the berries bubbles up around the dough.
Chocolate Truffles
If the word “ganache” intimidates you, you are not alone. Maybe if the stuff were called “basic, simple and entirely superior chocolate sauce,” more people would make it. Ganache is not just chocolate sauce, though; it is also the basis for the easiest chocolate truffles.
Mark Bittman’s Bourbon Apple Cake
Soaking a cake in liquor or syrup is an old concept. Bake a standard cake, like this golden one, and when it's done, pour enough sweetened, butter-laden alcohol over the top to really saturate it. The result is strong and juicy and makes frosting superfluous.
All-in-One Chocolate Cake
This is the perfect chocolate cake: beautiful, melting, intense but not heavy. The batter comes together quickly in a food processor, and the cake bakes at 350 degrees for a while, giving the baker time to assemble the frosting, which is given a luscious sheen by a bit of corn syrup. Use the best chocolate you can find for the frosting, and gild it however you like: with a few flowers, some birthday candles or nothing at all.
Chocolate-Butterscotch Icebox Cake
With homemade chocolate wafer cookies and a maple-laced butterscotch whipped cream, this recipe takes icebox cake to a more sophisticated level without sacrificing any of its lusciousness. You can build the cookies and cream into any shape you like — a round, a rectangle or a heart, which is what we do here. If you have cookies and cream left over, you can sandwich them together, whoopee-pie style. The wafers can be made up to a week ahead of when you’d like to assemble the cake. Store them airtight and try not to eat them all before you make the rest of the cake.
Vanilla Sugar
Blueberry, Almond and Lemon Cake
A slice of this berry-dotted cake is perfect late in the morning, for afternoon tea or after dinner, with coffee. It keeps for up to three days in a sealed container, but is at its absolute best on the day it's made.
Chocolate Pudding With Raspberry Cream
This rich, creamy chocolate pudding is a comforting dessert for two that comes together in no time at all. Use Dutch-process cocoa powder for the richest chocolate flavor, but natural cocoa will work too, if that’s what you keep around. This pudding is also easy to dress up for any occasion. Raspberry cream and a handful of fresh raspberries adorn this version, but you could also top with a dollop of whipped cream or crème fraîche.
Flourless Chocolate Cake With Halvah Honey Sauce
Egg whites give this intensely rich cake its leavening and delicate texture, while a halvah honey sauce elevates it to something entirely new. It is an easy cake to make, and works beautifully even without the sauce, making it perfect for Passover. And it takes almost no time at all.
Raspberry Vinegar Tart
Blackberry Apple Pie
Packed with spiced fruit, this feels like an old-fashioned apple pie, with a coziness beneath the modern lattice. Juicy blackberries highlight the tanginess of sweet-tart apples and tint the filling a mellow shade of pink. Wide dough strips, tightly woven, leave just enough of a gap in the top to allow a little steam to vent. Keeping the abundance of fruit mostly encased helps it bake through to tenderness and allows their juices to thicken to a jammy syrup. If you don’t want to weave a lattice, you can simply cover the filling with a round of rolled dough and cut vent holes in it.
Peanut Butter Cookies
No mixer is required to make these craggy rounds that deliver all the comfort of eating a spoonful of peanut butter straight out of the jar — but with the creamy-candy richness of peanut butter chips in each bite. (If you’re a crunchy peanut butter person, you can throw in whole salted nuts, too.) Because of their low proportion of flour, these little disks develop fudgy centers inside lightly crisp edges. There are countless varieties of peanut butter in markets and all yield different cookie results. These use natural peanut butter, which is just peanuts blended with salt, so they taste especially peanutty.
Raspberry Vinegar Float
Puppy Chow
This delightfully messy Midwestern treat is simple enough for kids to make: Just toss crispy cereal with melted peanut butter and chocolate, then dust with lots of confectioners’ sugar. The recipe’s origins are murky, but puppy chow, or muddy buddies, can probably be traced back to recipe pamphlets and community cookbooks from the 1960s. Unlike the version on the back of the Chex cereal box, this recipe calls for a whole box of cereal and for cooling the chocolate-coated cereal a bit, which encourages clusters to form and helps the sugar stick. The cooled cereal is then tossed with confectioners’ sugar on a baking sheet for even coverage. There are many additions to consider: popcorn, chocolate chips, pretzels, nuts, mini marshmallows — the list goes on.
Rhubarb-Strawberry Mousse
Flourless Cocoa Cookies
Glossy and near black in color, these intense, easy-to-make chocolate cookies are like a cross between fudge and the deepest of brownies -- and gluten-free to boot. We discovered them in "The Fearless Baker" by Erin Jeanne McDowell. A little cinnamon gives them a spicy complexity, but you can leave it out for a more purely chocolate flavor. Be sure to use bittersweet rather than semisweet chocolate, or they could end up cloying rather than balanced.