Dessert
3850 recipes found
Frosted Holiday Sugar Cookies
Whether you're making Santas or dreidls, shamrocks or bunnies, this foolproof cookie and royal icing recipe is the only one you need. Don't skip chilling the dough after rolling it out. It really helps the cookies keep their shape while baking. And if you'd like to frost the cookies very generously, consider doubling the icing amounts below.
Strawberry Sorbet
This mouthwatering summer sorbet is an adaptation of one served at the River Café in London. Yes, it calls for an entire lemon (rind and all), but trust us: the sweet of the strawberries and sugar, the tart and bitter of the lemon – it all works together beautifully.
Moka Dupont: A French Icebox Cake
When my Paris friend, Bernard Collet, told me about this cake, a favorite for over 60 years in his family, I was expecting something tall, soft, frosted and fit for candles. I expected a gâteau but got an icebox cake: four layers of cookies held together with four layers of frosting. The cake, originally a back-of-the-box recipe, was created for a French tea biscuit called Thé Brun, but I could never find them, so I used Petit Beurre cookies. Lately I can’t find them either, so I use old-fashioned Nabisco Social Teas. You can use whatever cookies you’d like, but they should be plain, flat, square or rectangular. Depending on the size of your cookies, you might need fewer of them; depending on how big or small you make the cake, you might need to juggle the number of layers or the amount of frosting. It’s a recipe made for improvisation.
Lemon Gelato
A proper Italian gelato di crema is sort of like vanilla ice cream, only in place of vanilla, you infuse the milk with a modest grating or shaving of lemon zest. This doesn't turn it into lemon ice cream, itself a cool dollop of heaven. What happens, rather, is that the small-volume scent of lemon makes the eggs eggier and the custard creamier. In short, we're talking platonic ideal of ice cream.
Lemon Poppy Seed Poundcake
This lemon poppy seed poundcake is summery and quick to make, and perfect for a picnic. One tip: cut up the poundcake before the picnic but leave it in the baking pan. It makes it easier to transport, and the pan protects it, too. Then serve it on its own, with ripe berries, and let the ants enjoy the crumbs.
Bittersweet Chocolate Ice Cream
From the perspective of a home cook, egg-free ice creams are simpler than custard-based ones, and more foolproof. You don’t have to worry about tempering the yolks, or fear curdling. A few spoonfuls of bourbon soften the texture of the ice cream, which otherwise would freeze rock solid.
Double Apple Pie
This recipe is a keeper. Gently spiced with cinnamon, tinged with brown sugar and loaded with apple butter, it’s as deeply flavored as an apple pie can be, all covered with a buttery wide-lattice top crust. Although it’s at its most ethereal when baked on the same day you serve it, it’s still wonderful made a day ahead. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Honey Apple Pie With Thyme
This recipe elevates the standard American classic into something a little loftier: two types of apples, swathed in a caramelized glaze of honey and thyme, tempered with a bit of ginger and salt. Don't be intimidated by making crust – our pie crust guide will step you through everything you need to know.
Peaches and Cream Pie
This recipe is inspired by the fruit and cream pies at Briermere Farms, in Riverhead, N.Y., a fruit farm and bakery on the North Fork of Long Island. Here, a press-in graham cracker crust is swapped in for the traditional pastry crust, but otherwise the recipe stays true to the signature pie, with a giant mound of fresh sliced peaches concealing a lightly sweetened whipped cream filling beneath. Cream cheese acts as a stabilizer in the whipped cream, allowing you to assemble the crust and filling in advance — but once you add the peaches, the pie is best served within the hour. Perfectionists take note: This pie is a little messy, but that’s part of its charm. If you can’t find ripe, juicy peaches, this recipe is equally delicious made with fresh strawberries or blueberries. The quality and ripeness of the fruit is more important than the variety.
Neapolitan Cake
Here is an excellent project recipe that Christine Muhlke, then an editor and columnist at The New York Times Magazine, brought to us in a 2007 profile of the cookbook writer Gail Monaghan, who adapted it from a cookbook written by the Vicomte de Mauduit in 1933. It is infinitely more chic and cosmopolitan than most Neapolitan cakes, with no cartoon hue or bulk.
Tamarind Cream Pie
With its bright, fruity acidity and a bittersweet depth, tamarind makes for an especially complex cream pie that’s a bit like Key lime, but with a molasses-like edge. This is a good dessert to prepare ahead: You can bake and chill the pie up to 3 days ahead, then add the whipped cream and orange zest up to 6 hours before serving. Keep the pie refrigerated until just before you cut it.
Simple Vanilla Ice Cream
The texture of this ice cream is better than almost any commercial ice cream, many of which are filled with air (at least when the ice cream is fresh, which is how it should be eaten — straight from the machine). It requires no eggs either, which means no custard, so it's much simpler to make. The recipe even works with skim milk, if not quite as brilliantly. With skim milk or half-and-half, this is a much less fat-laden ice cream than one made with six eggs.
Foolproof Pie Dough
Vodka is essential to the texture of the crust and imparts no flavor — do not substitute. This dough, which was developed by a test-kitchen team led by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt for "America's Test Kitchen," will be moister and more supple than most standard pie doughs and will require more flour to roll out (up to 1/4 cup).
All-Purpose Pie Dough
Doris’s Salty Hot Fudge
This recipe came to The Times from Doris Muramatsu, a musician with the band Girlyman. It takes about 15 minutes to make and is particularly terrific over ice cream with some spicy pecans chopped on top. It is also an easily made token of true friendship and cheer: pour some into small jars and give it to friends.
Chocolate Truffle Brownies
If you're a member of the cake-y brownie club, move along. If fudge-y is your jam, step right up. These brownies are soft, dense and super-rich, but the best part is that they are incredibly simple to make. Melt butter in a saucepan (we often melt ours in the microwave because who needs another pot to clean?) then stir in the chocolate until it's melted. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients, pour it all into a buttered pan, slide it into the oven and in about a half hour: brownies worthy of their name.
Rum-Glazed Mango And Papaya
Intense Chocolate Mousse Cake
There is very little that needs to be said about a chocolate mousse cake. This one lives up to its name. It is gloriously intense. But the whisked egg whites ensure that it has a balancing lightness. A slice of it, with a smattering of fresh raspberries and a dollop of cream, or better still, sour cream, is the perfect finale. It may also invite a certain inelegant gluttony at the end. I have noticed that even those who claim not to go in for desserts come back for more.
Easiest Chocolate Sauce
East 62nd Street Lemon Cake
Maida Heatter’s famous lemon cake first appeared in The Times in a 1970s feature highlighting a few of her best-loved cake recipes. This one was actually found by her daughter, Toni Evins Marks, who lived on East 62nd Street at the time. Ms. Marks, who went on to illustrate a number of Ms. Heatter's cookbooks, sent it to her mother. She tinkered with it and renamed it. The cake, which is tender, moist and scented with lemon zest, is brushed with a simple glaze of lemon juice and sugar when it's still warm so it soaks into the cake. It's a timeless dessert that's perfect for practically any celebration. (Note: Some readers have mentioned in the notes below the recipe that "Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts" instructs you to bake this cake at 350 degrees. Our recipe, the one that Craig Claiborne ran in 1970, before Ms. Heatter's book was published, indicates 325. Either will work, but if you bake at 350, start checking for doneness just before the hour mark.)
Lemon Angel Food Cake With Preserved Lemon Curd
Adding preserved lemon juice to lemon curd is the brilliant brainchild of Samantha Kincaid, the pastry chef of the restaurant High Street on Hudson. It adds a complex brininess to what can be an overly sweet citrus custard. In this recipe, the curd is lightened with a little whipped cream and used to frost and fill a lemon-flavored angel food cake. It’s a stunning dessert that’s bright, rich and light all at once.
Cherries With Chocolate In Ricotta
Irish Trifle
I call this Irish trifle because it was my Irish ex-in-laws who introduced me to this wonderful dish. It is one of the most irresistible desserts I make. I love to have leftovers because the cake just keeps soaking up that amazing custard sauce, which is spiked with sherry. I use up a few of the egg whites left over from making the crème anglaise in the cake, opting for a biscuit, in which the egg whites are beaten to a meringue, over a richer sponge cake. Although jam is traditional in this trifle, you could always top the cake with a berry compote instead.
Cranberry-Lemon Stripe Cake
This small, rich, impressive cake is a bit of a magic trick. It looks like a standard buttercream-covered cake, but cut it open, and it reveals several fine pink vertical layers. The key is to make a thick, flexible sponge and turn it into a single jelly roll using three smaller, connecting pieces, joining them up as you go, then sitting it upright (check out this video for step-by-step instructions). In Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi's original version, that buttercream is flavored and stained with a pulp of simmered black currants, but this one incorporates the tartness of cranberries instead.