Dessert
3903 recipes found
Chocolate Babka
Baking a chocolate babka is no casual undertaking. The Eastern European yeast-risen coffee cake has 14 steps and takes all day to make. But the results are worth every sugarcoated second – with a moist, deeply flavored brioche-like cake wrapped around a dark fudge filling, then topped with cocoa streusel crumbs. If you want to save yourself a little work and love Nutella, you can substitute 1 1/2 cup (420 grams) of it for the homemade fudge filling. Also note that you can make this over a few days instead of all at once. Babka freezes well for up to 3 months, so if you need only one loaf now, freeze the other for later.
Buttery Almond Cookies
Made with high-fat, cultured butter, these melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies are like the most tender shortbread you’ve ever eaten. A simple confectioners’ sugar icing and a sliced almond topping make them especially pretty, but you can skip the garnish for something sleeker and simpler. Or use them to make sandwich cookies, filling them with the likes of lemon curd, raspberry jam or melted chocolate.
Gingerbread House
Here is all you need to know to build a gingerbread house: a delicious recipe, instructions for assembly, and a printable template provided by Nina Cooke John, a Manhattan architect. The recipe came to us from Genevieve Meli, the pastry chef at Il Buco Alimentari in Manhattan, and it works just as well for cookies as it does for a gingerbread house. This recipe makes one small house, so you may consider doubling the recipe for a larger structure, but note: only one recipe at a time will fit in the bowl of a standard stand mixer, so plan ahead. (Ms. Cooke John and Ms. Meli also built a gingerbread structure for us, and you can watch that here.)
No-Bake Chocolate Clusters
These little cookies are a bunch of good things all at once: crunchy and chewy, sweet and salty, craggy and never neat, or ever the same, which is just as they should be. The must-have ingredients are melted chocolate, either dark or white (or both), and cornflakes. The coconut is optional, and the cranberries are up for grabs — you can swap them for raisins or small bits of other dried fruit. Since these require nothing but melting and stirring, and because the ingredients are so basic, these can be a spur-of-the-moment cookie, a boon when there’s often not enough time.
Panettone Bread Pudding
If you’ve bought a loaf of truly fantastic panettone, made in the Italian tradition from a natural starter, the kind that’s airy and melting, we hope you don’t have any leftovers. But if you find yourself with an excess of mass-produced panettone, or simply very old panettone that’s past its prime, here’s how to transform it into something special. Cut it into thick slices, as the pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt does with brioche, when she makes her bread pudding at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Toast them. Now layer the bread in a wide dish, and pour over a whisked custard of milk and eggs. It will look like too much liquid, but as it bakes, the panettone will soak it all up, becoming moist and tender and impossibly rich. It’s close enough to a casserole of French toast to make it ideal for a special holiday breakfast, but sweet enough to step in as dessert on a cold night. Vanilla would be a classic way to flavor the custard, but panettone tends to be quite sweet and perfumed already, so taste the bread first before adding extras.
Homemade Pocky
These crunchy cookie sticks are inspired by Pocky, the machine-made Japanese treat. They don’t pretend to be the perfectly straight version from the box, but they're freshly baked and taste far better. They're also fun to make: The dough is forgiving and easy to work with, so shaping it is as simple as rolling a Play-Doh snake. Decorating presents an opportunity to go wild. Mix matcha powder or pulverized freeze-dried berries with white chocolate; pair milk chocolate with hazelnuts; or combine dark chocolate with almonds or pecans. Sprinkles, shredded coconut or sesame seeds add flair.
Mokonuts’ Rye-Cranberry Chocolate-Chunk Cookies
These are the cookies that stopped me in my tracks. I was wandering along a side street in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, saw these cookies on a counter in the back of Mokonuts, a small restaurant, and walked right in to buy a few. The baker Moko Hirayama has worked on her recipe with so much care and invention that it’s almost difficult to see any family resemblance to cookie's inspiration: the classic American chocolate-chip cookie. Her cookies have chunks of fine chocolate (not store-bought chips), dried cranberries, rye flour and a good measure of poppy seeds, for color, crunch and surprise. Plan ahead: Once the dough is made and formed into balls, it should be refrigerated overnight before baking. Fresh from the oven, the cookies are fragile; they firm as they cool. They’ll keep for about three days at room temperature or they can be frozen for up to two months; in either case, they should be wrapped well.
Chocolate Pecan Pie
Here is a pie that might make Thanksgiving purists shake their heads. Chocolate and pecan? But bear with us. The bittersweet chocolate adds depth to what is traditionally an achingly sweet pie, and the bourbon gives it a grownup finish. For more delicious pie recipes, check out our collection of Thanksgiving pies.
Crunchy Coconut Twists
At first glance, these long, skinny cookies look a lot like savory cheese straws, the kind of thing you’d nibble with cocktails. But those golden shreds are coconut, not Cheddar, embedded in store-bought puff pastry and coated with sugar. They’re crunchy, caramelized, and look dramatic on a cookie plate. Try to seek out all-butter pastry for the richest flavor. And if you come across chocolate puff pastry, even better!
Maple Cream Pie With Blueberries
In this blueberry pancake pie, the best diner breakfast toppings — maple syrup, whipped cream and saucy blueberries — come together in a buttery crust. Boiling down pure maple syrup intensifies its deep woodsy sweetness, which blends into a softly set custard that slices neatly after chilling. The filled pie can be refrigerated for days, but the cream should be whipped and swirled on top just before serving for the prettiest and tastiest swoops.
Italian Ricotta Cookies
Jessica Hulett’s tender, cakey ricotta cookies taste like the white part of the best black and white cookie you've ever had. The recipe comes from Ms. Hulett’s grandmother Dorie, who used to flavor the cookies with anise, if she used flavoring at all. Adding lemon zest gives the cookies a fragrant brightness. We approve.
Dark Chocolate Pudding
This rich, creamy confection crosses a classic, American, cornstarch-thickened chocolate pudding with a luxurious French egg-yolk-laden chocolate custard called pot de crème. It has a dense, satiny texture and a fudgelike flavor from the combination of bittersweet chocolate, cocoa powder and brown sugar. Make sure to serve it with either whipped cream or crème fraîche for a cool contrast; crème fraîche has the advantage of also adding tang.
Lisbon Chocolate Cake
On my first day in Lisbon, I became a statistic: I lost all my credit cards to a talented thief on the No. 28 tram. After “the incident,” I wanted to leave Lisbon, but instead, my husband Michael and I decided to tackle our must-taste list. It was on our last day in Lisbon that we tasted the cake at Landeau Chocolate. It was intense, but not overwhelming; truly chocolate, but somehow each layer’s chocolateness was different. I returned home and made this cake, my version of the cake that cured my pickpocket blues. It’s a dense-but-not-heavy, brownielike cake topped with a whipped chocolate ganache (think: mousse) and a substantial dusting of cocoa. Because this cake is completely about the chocolate, choose one you love.
Orange Sour Cream Cake With Blueberry Compote
This deeply tender orange cake is the perfect backdrop for a vivid sauce made of blueberries, sugar, lemon juice and cornstarch. The cake and syrup are both quite simple to make (you'll have to pull out your mixer though), and the syrup keeps for several days in the refrigerator. After the cake is long gone, you can enjoy the remainders drizzled over vanilla ice cream or layered with plain yogurt.
Chocolate Whiskey Cake
This recipe came to The Times from Marti Buckley Kilpatrick, who adapted it from Dol Miles, the pastry chef at Frank Stitt’s Bottega restaurant in Birmingham, Ala. Ms. Kilpatrick describes the cake as an ugly frog of a confection, but promises that anyone willing to bet a kiss on its excellence would be amply rewarded. The interplay of coffee, black pepper and cloves is subtle but powerful, and results in a deeply flavored, moist confection that comes together quickly. It’s just delicious.
Melomakarona (Greek Olive Oil-Honey Cookies)
These classic Greek holiday cookies are made from a combination of olive oil and semolina. This gives them a cakelike texture that’s crumbly yet still very moist, thanks to a soak in a fragrant, honey-sweetened syrup spiked with cinnamon and orange. Traditionally topped with chopped walnuts, you can use any nuts you like; pistachios are especially pretty with their pale green edges.
Caramel Apple Pie
Here, a carnival caramel apple is stacked onto a buttery crust: The snap of fresh apple slices gives way to soft salted caramel and a melt-in-your-mouth cookie base. It’s put together as a pie with layers like a bar cookie for a look that’s impressive but simple to pull off. The dough doesn’t require rolling. Instead, you press crumbs into a pie plate and end up with a cross between sturdy shortbread and sandy French sablés. A candy thermometer takes the guesswork out of caramel, but you don’t need one to make the stretchy filling. For a tangy contrast to the filling’s sweetness, use tart green apples, but feel free to swap them for other varieties you like.
The Silver Palate’s Chocolate Cake
This recipe is adapted from “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” written by Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso, who through their store in Manhattan, the Silver Palate, introduced bisteeya and poppy-seed dressing to the Upper West Side. For many, their cookbook, originally published in 1982, was a book of revelations: even if you hadn’t mastered the art of French cooking, a meal of chicken Marbella and an indulgent dessert, cooked with confidence, was not beyond your grasp. Enter this decadent chocolate cake, whose title belies its incredible simplicity. The ingredients take hardly any time to whip together, and it bakes in a tube pan for under an hour. Gild it with a gooey chocolate frosting, and feed it to those you love with good cheer.
Chocolate Mousse
Each mouthful of this dessert is a marvel: as light as a meringue pie topping, but with the eggy silkiness of a creamy chocolate custard. This mousse has a particularly airy texture, but is still a little rich from the bittersweet chocolate, which makes it the ideal not-too-sweet dessert. Because the mousse develops an even deeper flavor over time, it’s perfect for parties. You can make it up to five days ahead of time and serve it straight from the refrigerator.
Piparkakut
In 2009, The New York Times asked readers to send photos and recipes of their holiday cookies. About 100 people answered the call, including Naomi Donabedian, a graphic designer who lived in Brooklyn. She submitted this recipe for piparkakut, a Finnish cookie that incorporates cloves, black pepper, cardamom, ground ginger and orange zest. She wrote of the “big 3D flavor” imparted by freshly ground cardamom, but you can use pre-ground cardamom if you like. The dough can be difficult to roll out, but keep at it. This crisp, delicate, aromatic cookie will be your reward.
Pumpkin Bread With Chocolate Chip Streusel
This pumpkin quick bread is everything you love about the traditional version, but with a ribbon of spiced-chocolate-nut streusel running through the center and topped with more of the same. We like ours served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Lemon Cream Cheese Cookies
Chewy and sweet, these simple cookies are heavenly with a cup of tea — and a lavish dose of fresh lemon zest provides some pluck. Cream cheese is the star ingredient in both the cookie and its glaze, and performs two tasks: It imparts tanginess and contributes to the soft texture. These cookies are simple but delicate, so you’ll want to pull them from the oven as soon as they begin to turn golden, then let them cool directly on the baking sheets until they firm up. The glaze is optional, but it’s easy to whip together while the cookies cool.
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
These taste distinctly homemade: much smaller than giant, thick bakery-style disks and more delicate, with just enough buttery dough to bind the chocolate and oats. Mixing by hand turns out cookies that are crisp at the edges and tender in the centers. These can be mixed and baked in under an hour, but the dough balls also can be packed in an airtight container and refrigerated for up to 3 days, or frozen for up to a month. You can bake them from ice-cold, though they’ll need a few more minutes to turn golden brown.
Peanut Butter-Paprika Cookies
This recipe comes from Sister Pie, a Detroit bakery specializing in pies and baked goods, like blueberry plum balsamic pie, buttered corn scones and rhubarb blondies, that are “comforting with a side of adventure.” These oversize cookies embody that ethos. They’re tender, sweet and peanut buttery, but gussied up with a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and a hint of smoked paprika.