Dessert
3903 recipes found
Chocolate Streusel Poundcake
In this stunning dessert, a moist and soft chocolate poundcake is topped on two sides — bottom and top — with crunchy, slightly salty streusel flecked with chocolate chips. The combination of cocoa powder and melted dark chocolate gives this cake a particularly rich flavor. You can make it up to 3 days ahead. Store it at room temperature, well wrapped in foil. Then serve it topped with ice cream or whipped cream and fresh berries, or toasted and buttered, or plain as it is. It also freezes well for up to 3 months. More romantic recipes, from dinner for two to chocolate for all, can be found here.
Italian Lemon-Ricotta Cake
Migliaccio, often served at Carnival, is a lemon-ricotta cheesecake with a difference: a base of semolina flour, which makes it lighter than your typical cheesecake.
Hibiscus-Spiraled Ginger Cookies
Floral hibiscus and citrus zest, along with coarse sugar, make up a delightful swirl in a buttery shortbread dough with contrasting textures from chewy candied ginger and caramelized raw sugar. Every bite of this cookie is suffused with delicately sweet flavors, which are complemented by a slight fruity tang. For the prettiest spiral, make sure to roll your log tightly. The log can be wrapped and frozen for up to one month, or refrigerated for up to three days, then sliced and baked without thawing.
Indoor S’mores
You may not have a grill or the weather may not be cooperating, but you can still revel in this childhood favorite, and it's a brilliant way to make s'mores for a crowd. Also brilliant: melted chocolate is spread on both of the graham crackers for each s'more, so the chocolate envelops the marshmallow with each bite.
Chocolate Lime Pie
Violet Bakery Rye Brownies
You wouldn’t necessarily think adding rye flour to brownies would be a good idea, but it’s fabulous. The flour lends a deep earthiness that works wonderfully with the bittersweet depth of the chocolate. A sprinkle of flaky sea salt on top makes it taste even more chocolaty. These brownies are extremely moist, so don’t overbake them; they should still be a bit wobbly in the center when you pull them from the oven. They’ll solidify as they cool.
Pecan Shortbread
This pecan shortbread — crumbly, salty and buttery, with a touch of cardamom — is delicate in flavor but sturdy enough in structure for a dessert on the go, ready for picnics or potlucks. Make this easy shortbread a day or two before you need it. After slicing, store the pieces in a tightly closed cookie tin. They’re lovely alone, just out of the tin, but you can augment them with a bowl of cherries, nectarines and peaches, or ice cream, if you wish.
Ice Cream Sandwiches
These ice cream sandwiches make a perfect summertime treat. The thin brownie cake layer bakes quickly, which is a bonus on hot days, and the filling need not be homemade. Freezing time can vary so be sure to plan ahead. Give the assembled cake plenty of time before trying to cut and wrap individual sandwiches and make sure the finished sandwiches are well-frozen before serving.
Chocolate Stout Cake With Coffee Glaze
This dark chocolate cake relies on stout beer to add malted notes. Coffee helps enhance the chocolate flavor, and sour cream keeps the cake moist for days. A spiked coffee glaze studded with cacao nibs lends crunch and a nice bitter edge. This recipe calls for natural-process cocoa powder, which, along with other acidic ingredients like dark brown sugar, coffee, beer and sour cream, reacts with baking soda to make the cake rise. Dutch-process cocoa is chemically neutral and should not be substituted here, as it may cause your cake to rise unevenly and could produce an unpleasant flavor. Available from speciality baking supply stores and online, black cocoa powder is also used in this recipe to enhance the dark cocoa color and flavor, but feel free to substitute more natural cocoa powder.
Lucas Schoormans’s Lemon Tart
Lucas Schoorman, a Chelsea art dealer and hobbyist baker, introduced this elegant lemon tart to the Times in 2004. It's a showstopper dessert featuring two distinct, delicious layers: one of frangipani, an almond-rich custard, and another of shimmering lemon confit scattered with slices of lemon. It is mellow and barely sweet, rich and deep, with none of the attack of so many lemon desserts. Begin steeping the lemon slices the night before you're planning on baking the tart. This softens the rinds and coaxes out their bitterness.
Raspberry Spuma
This luxurious raspberry dessert is quite easy to make — you simply fold fresh raspberry syrup into a glossy stiff meringue and garnish with fresh berries. Though it is frozen, it is lighter and airier than ice cream, as it doesn’t freeze solid. It tastes rich, but contains no dairy.
Peach and Berry Macedonia With Sparkling Rosé
Fresh fruit compote always makes a perfect dessert, especially during the summer months, when stone fruits and berries are in season. This recipe relies on peaches, nectarines, blackberries and raspberries, but you could add apricots or cherries, too. Any dry white or rosé wine will work, but this Macedonia is especially good with sparkling wine, particularly sparkling rosé. Serve in wide glasses, so guests can sip the resulting juice. Top up with more bubbly, if you wish. Here, a bit of optional lavender perfumes the fruit, but lemon verbena or mint leaves would also be nice.
Pecan Pie Sandwich Cookies
These portable takes on pie are for nut lovers. The rich crunch of toasted pecans runs through them, from the brown sugar shortbread to the tender praline center. Ground nuts make the cookies both crumbly and crisp. More pecans are packed into the filling, which combines a deep sweetness with the texture of a soft caramel. A candy thermometer helps ensure the filling doesn’t end up saucy or chewy; it runs like lava during assembly, then sets as it cools. You can skip the filling for a batch of buttery cookies, or make it on its own to use as an ice cream topping. The assembled cookies keep at room temperature in an airtight container for up to five days.
Yogurt Cake
This Turkish yogurt cake, adapted from the cookbook “Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean,” is similar to a lemon-scented cheesecake, but it’s lighter and has a fresher, tangier flavor. It’s good both warm and cold, either on its own or topped with berries that have been macerated in a pinch or two of sugar. Make sure to use whole milk Greek yogurt or another thick, strained variety here, or the texture won’t be as creamy.
Not-So-Classic Peach Melba
A classic peach Melba is a dessert of poached peach halves and raspberry sauce with vanilla ice cream, invented by the French chef Auguste Escoffier, and named after the Australian soprano Nellie Melba. This not-so-classic version calls for sliced ripe peaches instead of cooked peach halves. Look for the best vanilla ice cream, with real vanilla, or make your own. Easy to assemble, it’s a lovely, refreshing and elegant dessert, perfect for when peaches and raspberries are in season.
Double Chocolate Chip Cookies
With plenty of cocoa powder and big wells of dark chocolate, these double chocolate cookies are so fudgy that a tall glass of cold milk is not only delicious, but essential — especially when they are served hot from the oven. Just like David Leite’s impeccable chocolate chip cookies, they bake up even better after the dough has had time to rest in the fridge. The extralong chill gives the dough a chance to hydrate fully and firm up, which yields more uniformly baked cookies, with the perfect amount of crunch around the edges and chew in the center. Thin chocolate discs or wafers, which are widely available, are used here. They melt into lovely chocolate layers as the cookies bake. But if you can’t find them, chocolate chips make a fine substitute; there's no need to adjust the baking time.
Chocolate Little Layer Cake
This recipe came to The New York Times in 2009 from Martha Meadows of somewhere between Slocomb and Hartford, Ala., where the worth of a cook can be measured in cake layers. In this corner of the country, everyone knows whose cakes are tender and whose consistently reach 12 thin layers or more. Ms. Meadows learned to bake 15-layer cakes from her mother, who cooked each layer one at a time in a cast-iron hoe-cake pan. The cake is frosted with warm boiled chocolate icing. Here is our tribute to that.
Nutella Panna Cotta
Set with gelatin instead of egg yolks, panna cottas are lighter - and easier to prepare - than most puddings. This one owes its richness of flavor to a healthy dose of Nutella and bittersweet chocolate.
Chocolate-Molasses Cookies
All you need to shape this dead simple dough are your hands (and maybe a helper or two). Decidedly more “grown up” in flavor — both the molasses and cocoa give bitter notes that play off the spiciness of the fresh ginger — the cookies are tiny in size by design to complement their intensity. For rolling, any coarse decorative sugar works, as would Demerara or an unrefined sugar.
Ruth Reichl’s Giant Chocolate Cake
In her new book, "My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life," Ruth Reichl calls this the cake that cures everything. The recipe produces a large stacked rectangular layer cake with whipped cream cheese in the frosting to add lightness and stability. The cake is very tender, based on a technique she first started using when she was a cook at the Swallow, a restaurant collective in Berkeley, Calif.
Classic Chocolate Éclairs
Master pâte à choux (choux pastry dough) and a world of dreamy, airy desserts opens up to you: éclairs, croquembouches, profiteroles, gougères and even churros. Choux pastry dough is unique in that it is typically prepared in a saucepan over heat, which might sound intimidating, but it is much more approachable than you might think. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can use a resealable plastic bag to pipe these éclairs — or turn them into cream puffs by simply dropping the dough in 2-tablespoon scoops about 3 inches apart onto a baking sheet. The pastry starts to soften as soon as the éclair is filled with custard, so indulge immediately. It won’t be difficult. Save any leftover chocolate glaze in the refrigerator. Reheated, it makes perfect hot fudge sauce.
Lemon Snacking Cake With Coconut Glaze
With a poundcake-like texture and zippy lemon flavor, this tender treat is loaded with grated citrus zest and topped with a sweet, mellow coconut frosting. Like many snacking cakes, it’s easily whisked together without a mixer, and quick to bake. Perfect as an afternoon pick-me-up, it goes as well with a glass of milk as it does with mugs of coffee, tea or hot cocoa.
Savory Mixed-Nut Shortbread
Inspired by the cocktail nuts served at Union Square Cafe in New York City — butter-rich, toasty warm and fragrant with rosemary and cayenne — this no-mixer press-in cookie is a joy to make. You simply melt butter with rosemary and black pepper, stir that into dry ingredients, and then press the dough into a pan. Salted nuts and more fresh rosemary go on top before the whole thing is baked and broken into ragged pieces. Persnickety cookie, this is not. Enjoy on a cheese board, with cocktails or after dinner with tea and dark chocolate. Or pack these in a cellophane bag and tie it with a bow to share as a gift. (The cookies will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a week.)
Blueberry Pie
Perfection is a fool’s mission when it comes to blueberry pie. Sometimes the filling is a little runny. Other times, slightly thick, depending on the blueberries themselves. But this recipe helps even the odds, with the use of arrowroot starch in place of the more typical flour or cornstarch, and an awesome pre-thickening technique picked up from the pastry chef Kierin Baldwin. You could use a different pie crust, but I like the all-butter version below, at least with a pre-baked bottom and an artfully cut top that allows steam to escape.