Dessert
3850 recipes found

Rice Pudding With Rose Water and Cardamom
Rice pudding is a common sight on buffets in Indian restaurants. If you’re looking for something sweet to wrap up your Indian meal at home, this could be the answer. This particular rice pudding is popular in north India, and is scented with super-aromatic cardamom as well a light splash of rose water.

Chocolate and Almond Tiger Cake
This almond cake is based on financiers, the small, usually ingot-shaped cakes first made in Paris in the late 1880s. The pastry chef Lasne created and named them for his stockbroker clients, keeping them easy and neat to eat on the run — no fuss, no muss. Made with egg whites, ground nuts and a lot of melted butter, the recipe is invitingly riffable. My favorite take is the tigré, a round, chocolate-speckled cake topped with a dab of ganache. Years ago, I misread the name, and I’ve called them tiger cakes ever since. My play on the tiger is a large cake, a little less rich than the original, run through with chopped chocolate and covered with enough ganache to leave telltale smudges. Stockbrokers beware.

Cookies-and-Cream Pavlova
The story goes that Pavlova, a dessert which both Australia and New Zealand lay claim to, is named after the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, who performed in both countries in the 1920s. Ms. Pavlova’s tutu, billowing round with layers of lace, is the inspiration for the creamy meringue dessert. This simple version combines a crackled, speckled meringue disk — crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside — and a swoopy crown of salted whipped cream. Fans of the marshmallows in Lucky Charms cereal will delight in this four-ingredient Pavlova, whose flavor is reminiscent of those hearts, stars and horseshoes. Here, the “cookies” in cookies-and-cream are, as ever, Oreos, which lend that dreamy teeter-totter of milky white and bittersweet black.

Mango and Sticky Rice Popsicles
These pops are ice-cold versions of mango sticky rice, a beloved Thai dessert. Glutinous rice (also called sweet rice or sticky rice) can be found in Asian markets, and it requires a special cooking method: Soak it overnight, then steam it. You can cook about 1/2 cup uncooked sticky rice to yield the 1 cup cooked rice needed for this recipe, or you can simply buy a side of cooked sticky rice from your local Thai restaurant. Don’t be tempted to use any other kind of rice here; sticky rice’s signature chew is a big part of this popsicle’s appeal.

Challah Bread Pudding
This bread pudding is a dream of a dish to use up leftover challah, babka, brioche or a mix of day-old breads. (You can even add dry cake!) Bake this as soon as it’s assembled — useful for last-minute brunch — or dip each piece of the bread in the vanilla cream sauce ahead of time, then prop the pieces vertically in an attractive baking dish and refrigerate, so all you have to do the next day is pop the pudding in the oven before bringing it to the table. Not too sweet, the bittersweet chocolate and poppy seeds add a nice touch and taste without overwhelming the vanilla and cinnamon. Your guests will gobble this dish up.

White Chocolate-Spice Cupcakes
Candace Nelson, founder of the Beverly Hills cupcake bakery Sprinkles, says Thanksgiving is one of the busiest holidays at the bakery. She says holiday eaters are usually excited to try new desserts but they still want to stick with the “Thanksgiving flavor profile.” “Spice cupcakes are certainly within the scope of traditional Thanksgiving flavors,” she says. “With the twist of the white chocolate cream cheese frosting, these have a decadent richness and tang that make for a perfect finish to everyone’s favorite meal.”

Nana José’s Chocolate Pecan Cake
A Passover flourless chocolate pecan torte, served with berries sweetened with shaved piloncillo, raw Mexican brown sugar, and flavored with lime juice.

Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies
You might think there's nothing new to learn about chocolate chip cookies, but this recipe by the baker and blogger Sarah Kieffer will prove you wonderfully wrong. The easy trick of banging the pan a few times during baking, causing the cookies to "fall," produces rippled edges that shatter in your mouth and a center that is soft and full of chocolate. Make sure to follow her instructions about freezing the dough and the size of the balls.

Miso-Maple Loaf Cake
This cake, adapted from “Baking With Dorie” (Mariner Books, 2021), is comforting and surprising. The ingredients that give it its name, miso and maple syrup, are strong characters, but they prove themselves good team players. When baked, their flavors are warm and satisfying, mellow and not immediately knowable at first. They hover in that space between sweet and savory. Coarse-crumbed — admirably so — and sturdy, the cake is easy to slice, easy to serve at breakfast and easy to pick up and nibble in the afternoon. It’s as good with butter and jam as it is with a little cheese. And it keeps well: It’ll hold at room temperature for about 4 days.

Key Lime Poundcake
Susan Levin Turner has taught many Southerners, both professional chefs and home cooks, how to bake a proper cake. She has made cakes for politicians and celebrities, and turned out five when the chef Edna Lewis turned 76. “Cakes bring people together for celebrations and funerals and everything in between,” she said. Ms. Turner, who owns Food Glorious Food in Tallahassee, Fla., developed this recipe to combine Key limes, a flavor associated with South Florida, with poundcake, a staple in the more rural, agricultural parts of North Florida. She bakes hers in an old-fashioned large square poundcake pan, but the recipe has been adapted here for a loaf pan, which is a little easier to find and work with. She likes to coat the inside of the greased cake pan with sugar, which helps the cake slide from the pan and offers a little more crispness to the crust. This recipe uses flour instead for tenderness, but the sugar method offers a homey Southern touch. Or use a combination of both.

Tres Leches Bread Pudding
Pastel de tres leches, a traditional Latin American dessert, consists of a basic sponge cake doused in three types of milk: condensed, evaporated and whole milk or cream. Inspired by the classic cake, this bread pudding transforms those three milks into a rich custard that gets absorbed by buttery cubes of brioche. As it bakes in a water bath, it becomes golden and toasty on the top and soft and pillowy on the bottom. Serve it at any temperature with a dollop of whipped cream and a drizzle of condensed milk. If you have any leftovers, eat them for breakfast topped with a little Greek yogurt and some fresh fruit.

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes With Olive Oil and Lime
Inspired by a meal at Le Jardin des Plumes in the French town of Giverny, where the artist Monet lived and worked, this dish is as beautiful as it is unusual: It’s simply a tomato gently roasted and basted with olive oil. It tastes vegetal and rich, as you’d expect, but it’s also sweet and citrusy. The surprise is at the core, which gets filled with sugar and lime zest. During the hours in the oven, the oil, sugar and zest find their way into every fiber of the tomato, technically making it a kind of confit, a dish usually cooked in fat or sugar — or, in this case, both. Serve the tomato warm or at room temperature as a starter, perhaps with a tiny salad, or, for your most adventurous friends, serve it chilled for dessert, topped with vanilla ice cream, a drizzle of oil and some flaky salt.

Easter Egg Nest Cake
It is, I hope, the acceptable face of culinary cute: a chocolaty flourless cake that falls on cooling. The sides crack, forming the outside of the nest, and into the cake's sunken cavity you spread a soft, voluptuous mixture of whipped cream and melted chocolate. And on top of this you drop small, sugar-coated candy Easter eggs. It's ease itself — especially as you can make the cake the day before, and given that the cracks and crevices are part of its charm, you don't need to be filled with perfectionist angst. And if not complying with the traditions of this holiday, you can fill the crater instead with cream whipped with a teaspoon of vanilla, and dust the top, cappuccino-style, with some cocoa pushed through a strainer. I've used both bittersweet and semisweet chocolate in this cake. Either way it works, either way it seduces. It has the denseness of a chocolate cake, but the lightness of a mousse. Even those who customarily push dessert away, smugly claiming not to eat sweets, will be coming back for second helpings.

Kitchen Sink Cookies
These salty-sweet, crisp-soft cookies are a great way to use up extra candy, baking chocolate and even pretzels and chips. Making toffee is surprisingly easy and it's fun to mix in chopped peanuts, sesame seeds or whatever you like — but store-bought toffee bits are fine, too. (And you can make the cookies smaller, or drop the chilled dough onto the cookie sheet instead of slicing it, if you prefer.)

Brown Sugar Shortcake with Warm Bourbon Peaches
The juicier the peaches, the better this luscious summer dessert will be. Handle the dough lightly and make sure not to overbake it. Assemble the whole thing just before serving, and watch it disappear.

Peach Raspberry Pie
The character of fresh raspberries can be fleeting when cooked, especially when the berries are mixed with other fruit like ripe, juicy peaches. To deepen the berry flavor in this summer pie, a little raspberry jam is mixed into the filling in place of some of the sugar. Instant (minute) tapioca serves as a clear, flavorless thickener here, with the tiny tapioca pearls echoing the texture of raspberry seeds. For a runny, syrupy pie that leaks when you cut into it, mix in the minimum amount of tapioca. Using all 3 tablespoons yields a pie with a thick, jammy filling. As for the stone fruit, peel the peaches or don't, to taste. Or substitute ripe nectarines, whose peels are less pronounced.

Double Strawberry Cheesecake
This creamy pink dessert breaks out of the usual strawberry cheesecake mold. Instead of two distinct layers (creamy cheesecake on the bottom, bright red berries on top), the berries and cream cheese mixture are puréed together until smooth, silky and deeply flavored. A little red wine adds complexity and intensifies the rosy color, but feel free to use water or orange juice instead. Just don’t skip the goat cheese, which tamps down the sweetness and adds a mild and pleasant earthiness to the cake without being an obvious ingredient. You can make this three days ahead; store it in the refrigerator until just before serving. It’s at its best served cold.

Bibingka (Coconut Rice Cakes With Banana Leaves)
Bibingka is a cake made of rice flour, so it’s naturally gluten-free, chewy but tender throughout, with a soufflé-like fluffiness. It’s traditionally cooked in a clay pot over and under hot coals, a difficult setup to replicate; instead, I pour the batter into a cast-iron pan lined with banana leaves, which char as the cake bakes, infusing it with their scent. (You can cut the ribs off the leaves to make them more malleable.) Nearly halfway through baking, the cake is topped with salted duck egg, an ingredient available at Asian specialty groceries. If you can’t find it, the cake will be more forthrightly sweet, lacking that sly note of brine. As a final touch, if you have a kitchen torch available, char the edges of the banana leaves, so a little smokiness suffuses the delicate cake.

The $250 Cookie Recipe
Almost everybody has heard the one about the woman lunching at the Neiman Marcus Cafe in Dallas, who enjoyed the chocolate chip cookies so much that she asked for the recipe. For "only two-fifty," the waitress said, it was hers. But when the credit card bill arrived, the woman found the total near $300. Turns out the recipe cost $250, the story goes. In 1997, after years of enduring the myth, Neiman Marcus came up with a recipe – and gave it out for free. It's a delicious variation on chocolate chip cookies, using ground oatmeal, nuts and adding extra chocolate with a grated Hershey bar (you can use any brand you love).

A Spice Cookie to Share
The only thing better than a plate of cookies is one big cookie meant to be shared by everyone around the table. It’s the kind of dessert that will encourage your friends and family to linger at the table and to keep the conversation going. It’s a brown-sugar cookie redolent of ginger, honey, cinnamon and clove that carries the scent of the season and tacks between crisp and slightly chewy, between gingersnap and gingerbread. That it has ground coffee in it marks it as a sweet for grown-ups. It’s a roll-out cookie, but not a fussy one – any shape works and ragged is better than perfect. I usually sprinkle the cookie with sanding sugar, but you can drizzle it with melted chocolate or frost it, if you’d like. For extra fun, put out chocolate or caramel sauce (or both) and invite everyone to dip.

Apple Pie, Circus-Style
This winter in Paris, my husband went out every morning, walked to Circus bakery and returned home with an apple pie, a really good one. The rustic pie — a cross between an American open-face pie and a French galette — is made with a sturdy, rather wet dough. Chill the dough overnight and it will be a dream to work with. The filling is a generous mound of unpeeled, thinly sliced, lightly sweetened apples, flavored with an abundance of lemon juice and zest and, so surprisingly, not a speck of spice. At Circus, the palm-size pies are pentagonal. The dough is lifted up around the apples, pinched and pressed into shape. To learn to make the pastry at home, I watched Circus’s bakers at work. I loved how each had a particular way of forming the pies. But, most of all, I loved that no matter how they shaped them, in the end, they all looked beautiful. My pie looks beautiful and yours will, too.

Passion-Fruit Soufflé

Cheddar Cheese Coins
These snacks are packed with an intense cheese flavor that comes from blending extra-sharp Cheddar with nutty Parmesan. Mild scallions and spicy black pepper bring additional savory notes, which play up that cheesiness. The coins have golden crispy edges and slightly tender centers. They’re great for snacking on the go, serving as part of a cheese board or dunking into tomato soup. The recipe can easily be doubled for a holiday cookie swap, and the dough can be made 1 month ahead and kept frozen wrapped tightly in plastic wrap and stored in a resealable plastic bag; simply thaw, cut and bake when ready.

Pistachio Poundcake With Strawberries
Ground pistachios give this loaf cake a lovely nutty flavor, green hue and tender crumb. It's adapted from the cookbook "Sweeter Off the Vine," by Yossy Arefi, which often incorporates Middle Eastern ingredients in unexpected and appealing ways. Top slices of the cake with juicy macerated strawberries and a dollop of whipped cream. If you can't find lavender buds, use 1 tablespoon of finely chopped mint or basil leaves. But do not add the chopped herbs to the mortar with the sugar. Instead, toss them with the berries right before serving.