Dessert
3903 recipes found
Rustic Apple Streusel Pie
Be sure to slice the apples thin so that they cook in the amount of time needed to bake the crust — this isn’t a chunky filling.
Foolproof Tarte Tatin
Tarte Tatin isn't as American as apple pie, but it's a whole lot easier. With just four ingredients, it's all about the apples: the lovely taste and shape of the fruit are preserved by sugar and heat, with a buttery-salty crust underneath. This recipe from Gotham Bar and Grill in New York has a couple of tricks that make it easier to pull off than others: dry the apples out before baking; start by coating the pan with butter instead of making a caramel; use tall chunks of apple and hug them together in the pan to prevent overcooking.
Pumpkin Pie With a Vodka Crust
This recipe made waves among home bakers when it was published by Cook's Illustrated magazine in 2008 because of its brilliant use of vodka in the dough, which all but ensures that the baked crust is tender. The vodka, which evaporates in the hot oven, is essential here, and you shouldn't taste it in the finished crust, so do not skip it. The filling is delicious too, pillowy with a deep, rich flavor. Cook's Illustrated advised readers to add the filling to the prebaked crust when both the crust and the filling are still warm; it helps ensure accurate cooking times and a crisp crust.
Boston Cream Pie
An American classic, Boston cream pie isn't a pie at all. Its base is an old-fashioned hot milk cake, a downy-soft, buttery yellow cake. How you whip the eggs and the sugar is critical, as the tiny air bubbles they produce add lift to the finished product. This traditional version is best the day it's made, but will hold up in the fridge for a couple of days. You may just notice a slight change in texture. Slathered with homemade vanilla custard and a chocolate glaze, it hits all the right notes, but it would be just as lovely served with in-season berries or layered with chocolate or coffee custard instead of vanilla. Make it as is, or go rogue. Either way, it’s sure to please.
Chocolate Silk Pie
Light yet rich, this magical dessert is like the grown-up version of the chocolate pudding pie of your youth. It requires a bit more work, but nothing terribly taxing. Just whip melted chocolate, butter and eggs into a mousse, and then pour it all into a chocolate cookie crust. Chill and enjoy. It's the perfect make-ahead dessert for a crowd.
Butter Pie
Here is a recipe that Julia Moskin brought to The Times in 2010, from Esa Yonn-Brown at the Butter Love Bakeshop in San Francisco, with a crust so lumpy with butter that it would never pass inspection in a professional kitchen. With its caramelized filling of butter and brown sugar, her butter pie belongs to the same gooey tradition as sugar pie, chess pie, shoofly pie and, in recent years, the Milk Bar Pie served by Christina Tosi of the Momofuku restaurant empire.
Maida Heatter's Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies
The year: 1983. The place: Williamsburg, Va., where representatives from across the globe — and “some of the biggest and brightest names on the American culinary scene” — gathered. The Times’s own Craig Claiborne planned the menus; Paul Prudhomme, Wolfgang Puck and Zarela Martinez cooked; and Maida Heatter provided dessert. Among her offerings were these, chocolate cheesecake brownies, “a formidable new creation” for the time. Here, a layer of pecan-studded brownie meets a sheet of chocolate cheesecake. Make them for a group — or for yourself to eat over time. They freeze well, and can just as well be served frozen.
Spiced Caramel Syrup
While this syrup was created by the pastry chef Daniel Skurnick to pour over his Franco-Chinese steamed ginger-milk custard, it’s a good recipe to have handy when you want something to pour over cooked fruit, ice cream or pudding – I like it paired with vanilla, chocolate or butterscotch. It’s a quickly made syrup flavored with peppercorns, cloves, nutmeg and ginger. Mr. Skurnick says you should cook the caramel until its color is “Irish-setter red” before adding the spices – it’s a perfect description of what you’re looking for.
Banana Cream Pie
This recipe, from Dorie Greenspan's wonderful cookbook "Baking: From My Home to Yours," is simple but decadent, and very forgiving for the beginner baker. It’s a glorious mess of fruit and cream — the pressure is off to make it look perfect.
Gâteau d’Hélène (Coconut Cake)
This coconut cake was adapted from a recipe by Simone (Simca) Beck, best known as Julia Child’s co-author on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She called it “Gâteau d’Hélène: a white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot.” The recipe, published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, “Simca’s Cuisine” (Lyons Press, 1998), capped what she called a “carefree lunch” because it could be made ahead. Indeed, this cake is best baked, filled, frosted and refrigerated for at least an hour (or up to two days). Kind of like a madeleine, its layers are purposefully a bit dry, as they need to hold a dousing of orange juice and rum. The whipped cream filling and frosting is soft and dreamy. It’s an elegant celebration cake.
S’Mores Pie
This showstopper of a dessert is everything traditional s'mores are – chocolatey, gooey, crunchy – in grown-up, travel-friendly pie form. It is not difficult to make, but it does take some time, so set aside a few hours to make and assemble all of the worthy parts. Ultimately, what you end up with is a chocolate pudding pie in a graham cracker crust, topped with a blanket of homemade marshmallow that's browned to perfection.
Twice-Baked Sour Cherry Pie
Here is an intensely buttery, crispy-crust pie that exudes loads of syrupy cherry nectar when you plunge in the knife. In a quirk of pie-making tradition, open-faced pies, like custards, chocolate cream or pumpkin chiffon, get the best crust — pre-baked shells that are flaky, crisp and golden. But fruit pies, baked with raw dough that is often pale and soggy, get short shrift. For a fruit-pie crust that is crunchy and flaky, with a buttery texture that absorbs the fruit’s juices without turning to mush, the secret is pre-baking the bottom crust, then adding the fruit, covering it with raw dough and baking it again.
Malted Milk Ice Cream Bonbons
Frozen malted milk balls pulverized with a rolling pin are the beginning of this dessert. Mix the crumbs with malted milk powder and roll in ice cream for a weeknight treat.
Coconut Cream Pie
Coconut cream pie can assume all kinds of variations, with coconut extracts or coconut cream added to enhance the flavor. My mother’s version, which I grew up eating, is a more subtle, custardy version, with a balance of coconut and vanilla. It uses an old-fashioned technique called scalding, popular in the days before milk was pasteurized. Here it is used to change the texture of the milk and enhance its flavor. You can use the same sweetened, untoasted coconut to top the pie that you use in the filling, but the unsweetened, toasted coconut lends some nutty depth.
Banana-Cream Pie
Banana-cream pie is a fixture of Los Angeles dining, Jennifer Steinhauer reported for The Times in 2007. In large part, it seems that both the banana, a staple fruit in many parts of the world, and the cream pie, which is standard fare in the South and Midwest, appeal to the heterogeneous eaters of Los Angeles. Annie Miler, the owner and chef at Clementine, a bakery near Century City, who grew up baking banana-cream pies, told her, “People are sort of here from all over the country.” Her recipe follows. It’s fantastic.
Hot Fudge and Salted Chocolate Bits Sundae
Sundaes are the chamber music of the dessert world. Their composition and construction follow the contours of grand works, but mostly they’re played out in miniature, their delights designed to be shared by a duet or an audience of one, long spoon in hand. The composition of this sundae is classic. There’s ice cream – the flavors of your choice in whatever quantities you want; sauce –homemade hot fudge sauce based on dark chocolate (not chips, please); fresh whipped cream; and two different add-ins, toasted slivered almonds and chopped chocolate bits. It’s the bits that are the big surprise – they’re bittersweet chocolate and salt, melted together, frozen and then cut into morsels. The salt is unexpected, but not dissonant – it’s what brings out the best in the sundae’s other players.
Apple Cranberry Slab Pie
A slab pie is nothing more than a regular pie writ large. Baked in a 9-x-13-inch pan, this pie feeds 24 but is easier to make (and to carry) than 3 separate pies. The filling was inspired by an e-mail from Pete Wells, our restaurant critic, who mused about his ideal Thanksgiving dessert; the brown sugar, ginger and rum give it a complex and more autumnal flavor than most apple pies. Serve with whipped crème fraîche and small glasses of good, aged rum. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Award-Winning Maple Blueberry Pie
Paul Arguin, an epidemiologist, relaxes by making pie. This one, with its generous amount of fruit and sweetness from maple syrup, won the blueberry-division prize in the 2017 National Pie Championships. A few tricks raise it above other blueberry pies. One is the crust, which has a touch of cinnamon and maple sugar, and uses cider vinegar and just a little shortening for structure. Dr. Arguin cooks the filling in a sous-vide machine, which keeps the berries whole but tender. For the top crust, he borrows an idea from cake makers who work with fondant. Four planks of dough are pressed into an inexpensive silicone mat molded to look like wood grain, then peeled off and set on top of the pie. Home cooks without fancy equipment, take heart. The berries can be cooked slowly on the stove, and four strips of plain dough for the top crust work just as well.
Cranberry-Lemon Eton Mess
This is not a traditional Eton mess, the renowned British dessert usually comprising meringue, whipped cream and strawberries. I made one like that and loved it, but the elements just begged to be played with. For this, my favorite mess for the fall-into-winter season, I’ve added spice-cookie crumbs to the meringue for more flavor and a bit of surprise, made two add-ins — a quick-cook cranberry jam and a lemon curd — and stirred in some fresh raspberries (more tang, more color). Of course, I kept the whipped cream — it’s essential to a mess. Going with cranberries and curd make this a good choice for the holidays. You can serve the mess family style or in bowls, coupes or even canning jars. And if you want a bit more texture and another flavor, speckle the top with chopped pistachios.
Buttery French TV Snacks
Good butter is the key to these easy, delectable cookies. Before the pastry chef Anita Chu began work on her “Field Guide to Cookies” (Quirk Books), she was a Berkeley-trained structural engineer with a baking habit she couldn’t shake. One of her favorite cookies is the croq-télé, or TV snack, a chunky cookie she adapted from the Paris pastry chef Arnaud Larher. “There is no leavening to lift it, no eggs to hold it together,” she said. “It’s all about the butter.”
Brandied Pumpkin and Chestnut Pie
This is quite possibly the best pumpkin pie recipe out there. Why? It's got two layers (chestnut and pumpkin), and it calls for fresh squash in lieu of the canned stuff (although canned works just fine, too). We've heard from readers that people who think they don't like pumpkin pie love this one. And don't fret: You don't make the chestnut paste, you buy it. It's available online and at most specialty markets.
Lemon Meringue Cookies
Like their inspiration, lemon meringue pie, these cookies have three elements. They’re built on simple, slice-and-bake French shortbread cookies, rich, buttery and flavored with vanilla. The shortbread base is almost classic, except that the cookies are baked in muffin tins, so they’re straight-sided and deeply golden brown. The “filling” is lemon curd, and the topping is crunchy bits of meringue. You get crumbly, velvety and crackly, sweet and tart in every bite. These cookies were created for an imaginary friend, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the hero of 16 Louise Penny novels, and a man who considers lemon meringue divine.
Perfect Pie Crust
This classic dough contains no special ingredients, just flour, salt, butter and water, but it works like a dream. The recipe makes a single crust for a 9-inch pie; simply double it to make a double-crust pie. (If you make it by hand, you can even triple or quadruple the recipe.) If you’d prefer to use a food processor, you can, and it’s a good idea if you have warm hands. To do so, pulse the butter into the flour mixture a few times, until the butter is the size of walnut halves or peas, then transfer the mixture to a medium bowl and proceed with adding the water. (Adding the water in the food processor often leads to hydration problems and overmixing, which is why you should do that part by hand no matter what.) The dough keeps in the refrigerator for up to 2 days and in the freezer for up to 3 months (thaw it overnight in the refrigerator before rolling it out).
Nutmeg-Maple Cream Pie
This pie is a delicious twist on a custard standby, and it is exceedingly easy, a humble yet grandly flavored addition to any celebration. Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.