Dessert
3903 recipes found

Apple Green-Chile Pie With Cheddar Crust
In this savory-sweet treat, apples are layered with roasted green chilies, made savory with Cheddar cheese in the crust and sprinkled with a streusel topping of walnuts and brown sugar. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)

Vanilla Marshmallows
Homemade marshmallows should have their own dreamy name, something that makes it clear that they’re different from the supermarket stuff. When you make this recipe by Christine Moore of Little Flower Candy Co., you get puffs that are soft, tender, languidly stretchy and delicately sweet, and a lesson in the transformative power of heat and air. To make these, you beat together roiling-hot sugar syrup and gelatin, and watch as the mixture goes from murky to opaque, from beige to white, from thin to billowing. For this magic to happen, it takes almost 15 minutes, plus a very large bowl and a sturdy mixer. (I use a 5-quart stand mixer.) You need no special skills, just patience — you have to wait a few hours for the whipped mixture to dry — but you’ll be rewarded with singular sweets good for toasting, s’mores, snacking and wrapping up as gifts.

Poppy Seed Tea Cake
Poppy seeds belong to the small-but-mighty clan of ingredients: Their flavor is nutty, their aroma earthy, and their color, a gorgeous blue-black, dramatic. Even though they’re minuscule, they crack pleasantly under a light bite. Sprinkle poppy seeds over something sweet or savory and you add interest. Give the seeds a star turn and you add surprise. Although this simple loaf cake includes vanilla extract and lemon juice, it’s the flavor that you get from an abundance of poppy seeds that brings everyone back for more. The cake can be served plain, but it’s pretty spread with white icing and speckled with seeds. Remember that because poppy seeds are oily, they can go rancid — store them in the freezer and taste a few before using them.

Grand Flanero's Pumpkin Flan

Cocoa-Cornmeal Biscotti
Everything about these biscotti tends toward crunch – their signature double bake, of course, but also the addition of almonds and some cornmeal, which doesn’t lose its appealing roughness under heat. (Don’t think, as I mistakenly once did, that using a polenta-type cornmeal will improve these cookies — it will only make them gritty; choose a fine-grain meal.) The chocolate chips are there to reinforce the deep chocolate flavor the cookies get from being made with cocoa. I like these very crunchy, but if you prefer them less set, give them a shorter second bake. And after the first bake, when the logs have cooled for about 20 minutes, use a long serrated knife and a gentle sawing motion to slice them into cookies about 1/2-inch thick. Hold on to the inevitable crumbs and any little bits that might break off — you’ll be happy to have them over ice cream.

Ashley Judd's Peanut Butter Cake

Gâteau Basque
Bixente Marichular, founder of the Musée du Gâteau Basque in Sare, France, says the pastry is part of Basque patrimony: Every family has a recipe, and every family thinks theirs is the best. This version, made with ingredients from an American supermarket, follows the tradition of sandwiching two rounds of rolled-out dough with jam. In the Pays Basque, where the filling is sometimes pastry cream, the jam is usually local black cherry. Once baked, the texture of the “cake” — never mind that it’s about as much cake as Boston cream pie is pie — is a mix of crumbly, tender and chewy. Since gâteau Basque is a casual treat, eating it with your fingers is allowed.

S'mores Pot De Crème

Eve's Pudding

Blue Angel Cake

Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough

Lemon-Verbena-Peach-and-Raspberry Soup
Since we started our farm, I've rediscovered many vegetables and herbs that are not quite so mainstream. Lemon verbena is one of them. I'd often heard about it but never quite understood its fascination until we began growing it.''

Clementine-Pomegranate Jello Salad
A gelatin salad, or Jell-O mold, may seem retro, but when you make one from scratch, substituting fresh juice and fruit in place of artificial flavoring and color, it can be spectacular, making a great showpiece for a dinner party or buffet. This particular combination of tart clementine and sweet pomegranate is quite refreshing for a very light dessert, but it may also be served as a fruit salad.

Blueberry Crumb Cake
It’s easy to find an occasion to serve this cake — breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner or snacktime will do. The dominant flavor here is the berries. Don’t be tempted to increase the amount of walnuts in the topping — scarcity makes them even more delightful.

Spice-Poached Apples or Pears
Cooked fruits and simmered compotes are among the simplest of French family sweets. While they’re usually served with little more than heavy cream, crème fraîche, or plain yogurt, they can also be paired with rice pudding or French toast, moistening the pudding or toast with the poaching syrup and then spooning over the fruit.

Earl Grey Madeleines
Cédric Grolet, the pastry chef of Le Meurice hotel in Paris, is famous for his Instagram feed, which has nearly a million and a half followers, his tattoos and his title: Best Pastry Chef in the World. Mostly, and most rightly, he’s famous for his elegant pastries, so I was surprised when he asked me if I’d tasted one of his simplest, his madeleines. Small sponge cakes baked in shell-shaped molds (metal pans give you the best color and crust), madeleines are known for the impressive bump that develop on their tops. These madeleines, adapted from a Grolet recipe, are made with brown butter and flavored with Earl Grey tea and honey. Like all madeleines, they benefit from a rest in the refrigerator before they’re baked. (Good for the mads, convenient for the baker.) If you can arrange it, serve the madeleines just minutes out of the oven — it’s when their fragrance and texture are at their peak.

Pistachio and Cherry Bombe
This bombe was born of an accident and requires a little patience, lots of ice cream and a willingness to get crafty. Don’t be afraid to mix the biscotti dough by hand and play around when you are shaping it into your bowl. It won’t look perfect, but the bombe will be pristine. Confectioners’ sugar, cherries and grated pistachios are your allies to make this dish scream of delight. This bombe is frivolity at its finest, so don’t take the process of making it too seriously.

Pastelillos de Guayaba (Guava Cheese Pastries)
Panaderías in Puerto Rico are magical. Their brightly lit glass cases are lined with fresh-baked bread and rich pastries, begging you to order too many. As a child, I clamored for pastelillos (also called pastelitos) de guayaba. The pastries typically have a flaky crust and are filled with a generous smear of concentrated guava paste — an embodiment of tropical Caribbean flavor — and often with cheese, served glazed or dusted with powdered sugar. In East Harlem, or El Barrio, New York’s historic Puerto Rican enclave where I lived for some time, I discovered Valencia Bakery on East 103rd Street, which made a bite-size version with a generous amount of confectioners’ sugar, creating a portal between the island and my new home. My recipe is inspired by theirs. These are excellent with coffee, and will keep for several days, benefiting from a reheat in the oven.

Chamomile Tea Cake With Strawberry Icing
This buttery, chamomile tea-scented loaf is a sweet pop symphony, the Abba of cakes. A pot of flowery, just-brewed chamomile isn’t required for drinking with slices of this tender loaf but is strongly recommended. In life and in food, you always need balance: A sip or two of the grassy, herbal tea between bites of this cake counters the sweetness, as do freeze-dried strawberries, which lend tartness and a naturally pink hue to the lemony glaze. This everyday loaf will keep on the counter for 3 to 4 days; be sure the cut side is always well wrapped.

Fried Pear Pies

Walnut Pie With Molasses and Orange
This pie is fudgy, nutty, salty-sweet and spiked with citrus. It’s a meeting of sorts, between arguably Britain and America’s greatest desserts: the treacle tart and pecan pie. Cut corners by grating the crust instead of rolling it out, but don’t skip making your own bread crumbs and roasted walnuts; the texture and flavor rely on the freshness of both. Once you’ve prebaked the crust to biscuit brown, err on the side of undercooking the molasses-custard filling: It’ll firm up when cooled and stay gooey for days.

Pan de Muerto
You’ll find this pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, at the center of the elaborate Day of the Dead altar festooned with sugared skulls, flowers and other mementos of the family’s departed.

Prosecco Lemon Slush
Similar to the Italian cocktail sgroppino, which calls for a scoop of lemon sorbet, this recipe instead freezes Prosecco and Meyer lemon juice for a fresher taste and a cooling dessert. The slushy concoction makes a refreshing finish to a meal, and, topped with raspberries (and more Prosecco, if you wish), it looks festive, sort of like pink lemonade for grown-ups. Best of all, it stays fresh-tasting for several days, and never freezes completely solid.

Tender Pie Dough
This makes a large batch of dough. Divide it in half and use both halves, or freeze one portion to use another time.