Thanksgiving
2220 recipes found
Caramel Apple Pie
Here, a carnival caramel apple is stacked onto a buttery crust: The snap of fresh apple slices gives way to soft salted caramel and a melt-in-your-mouth cookie base. It’s put together as a pie with layers like a bar cookie for a look that’s impressive but simple to pull off. The dough doesn’t require rolling. Instead, you press crumbs into a pie plate and end up with a cross between sturdy shortbread and sandy French sablés. A candy thermometer takes the guesswork out of caramel, but you don’t need one to make the stretchy filling. For a tangy contrast to the filling’s sweetness, use tart green apples, but feel free to swap them for other varieties you like.
Chocolate Mousse
Each mouthful of this dessert is a marvel: as light as a meringue pie topping, but with the eggy silkiness of a creamy chocolate custard. This mousse has a particularly airy texture, but is still a little rich from the bittersweet chocolate, which makes it the ideal not-too-sweet dessert. Because the mousse develops an even deeper flavor over time, it’s perfect for parties. You can make it up to five days ahead of time and serve it straight from the refrigerator.
Pumpkin Bread With Chocolate Chip Streusel
This pumpkin quick bread is everything you love about the traditional version, but with a ribbon of spiced-chocolate-nut streusel running through the center and topped with more of the same. We like ours served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Spicy Crab Dip
This style of crab dip, often referred to as Maryland crab dip because of its Chesapeake Bay origins, makes for a festive appetizer. Here, it’s served hot out of the oven and is extra creamy thanks to the combination of cream cheese and a little mayonnaise. Though crabs are plentiful this time of year — and you can certainly make this with freshly steamed and picked meat if you’d like — canned lump crabmeat makes this dish simple to assemble. Just be careful to leave the clumps of meat as intact as possible when mixing. A sprinkle of cayenne pepper and a generous douse of hot sauce add heat to this flavorful dish.
Chocolate-Pumpkin Layer Cake
This rich and decadent spiced pumpkin cake is just the thing to serve for an autumn celebration, Thanksgiving or otherwise. Chocolate chips and chopped pecans are added to the pumpkin batter for extra sweetness and a bit of welcome crunch. For those who like to plan ahead, it can be made and frozen – iced and all. Just put the entire finished cake on a plate or a baking sheet, unwrapped, and freeze it overnight until it is hard. Then it can be wrapped without damage to the frosting, and returned to the freezer. Layers can also be wrapped well and stored, to be iced later.
Devil’s-Food Cake With Toasted-Marshmallow Frosting
Stella Parks developed this recipe for an all-butter triple-layer chocolate cake with a shockingly tender crumb and deep, fudgy flavor. The cake looks intimidating at first, but Ms. Parks's technique involves simply stirring all the ingredients together in a single 5-quart pan and then pouring it into 3 pans. Once they're cooled, level the puffy tops with a bread knife and put them together with marshmallow frosting for a true showstopper.
Ginger Chocolate Cake
Crème fraîche enriches this flourless cake, and dark cocoa powder bolsters its chocolate flavor. Both fresh and dry ginger add a nuance of heat and spice that show why ginger pairs so well with chocolate. Even though this cake is wonderful on its own, unsweetened crème fraîche dolloped on top and chewy, citrusy clementine confit takes this into a very sophisticated neighborhood.
Chocolate-Cardamom Pots de Crème
Rich and creamy with a hit of floral cardamom, these puddings are a perfect make-ahead dessert. For the most flavor, make sure to break open the cardamom pods and crush the seeds using a mortar or pestle or the handle of a wooden spoon. Semisweet chocolate is recommended, as bittersweet will mask the cardamom, but they are interchangeable if you prefer chocolate with a higher cacao percentage. (Accordingly, you may want to use the higher amount of cardamom if cooking with bittersweet chocolate, but do go easy: A little cardamom goes a long way.) You’ll need to use chopped chocolate bars or chocolate fèves for these pots de crème. Chocolate chips are made with stabilizers that inhibit melting, so would result in a pudding that is less smooth and spoonable.
Indian Nopales Salad
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.
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.
Salted Caramel Peanut Brownie Bars
With a chewy chocolate chunk-studded base and heaps of gooey peanut-laden caramel, these bars are part candy bar and part brownie with cookielike edges. Super-rich and satisfying, a little piece is all you need. A candy or deep-fry thermometer is an inexpensive and useful tool worth investing in to achieve a caramel that is neither too hard nor too soft.
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.
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.
Chinese Sausage-Rice Dressing
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.
Beet Dip With Labneh
This recipe for a delicious raw beet dip comes from Botanica, a vegetable-focused restaurant in Los Angeles run by Emily Fiffer and Heather Sperling. The recipe is easy — throw everything into the blender raw — though it requires a little time for the blades to break down the beets with walnuts, olive oil and a few other aromatics. Fiffer and Sperling cleverly adapted the dip from muhammara, the Middle Eastern spread made from red peppers. Using beets creates another dish altogether, but one that tastes bright, sweet and earthy. Serve it with a dollop of labneh, as well as warm pita and quartered Persian cucumbers for dipping, and generously drizzle everything with olive oil and crunchy salt.
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.
Pear-Pomegranate Pie
In this welcome departure from the traditional apple pie, a combination of Anjou and Bosc pears are caramelized in a mixture of pomegranate molasses and butter, then combined with a smaller portion of fresh, uncooked pears. The whole glorious mess is then dumped into an all-butter crust and baked until tender. The happy result is a pie that's soft and sweet, tangy and toothsome, and oh so good. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Sweet Potato Soufflé
This soufflé is not too sweet to serve as a starter at your Thanksgiving table, but it also makes an impressive dessert and it’s easier than pie to make. You can make individual soufflés or one large one.
Rye Pecan Pie
To streamline operations in the pastry kitchen at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the restaurant’s pastry chef, Avery Wittkamp, devised an enormous solution, which can be easily adopted by home cooks. She bakes this pie in a 10-inch springform pan, using a thicker, stretchable crust that can line the deep sides; it stays in place even when the pie is unmolded. Impressively, the tall bark-brown crust rises over a filling as wide, majestic and mahogany-brown as a redwood tree. She bakes the pie longer than usual to fully brown the crust, and gives it a higher crust-to-filling ratio than a traditional pie. She also deconstructs the traditional pecan pie filling into three strata: the custard, the chopped nuts and the whole nuts, each one delicious and distinct. (Don't be intimidated by homemade crust. Our pie crust guide will tell you everything you need to know.)
Baked Camembert Salad
Cheese encased in pastry and baked until brown might seem like an old-fashioned dish, but it’s one of the most reliable ways to please a small group of omnivorous people. Flaky pastry, warm, runny cheese, what’s not to like? Baking is also a great way to turn a mediocre wheel of cheese into something great. Cut the wheel in half, sandwich it with something savory and something sweet and wrap it up tightly with pastry. If you want to replace it with Brie, or another soft cheese with an edible rind, feel free — just make sure there aren’t gaps in the sides of the pastry, or the cheese will leak out in the oven.
Lemon Sweet Rolls With Cream Cheese Icing
These sweet, lemony rolls are a fresh alternative to classic cinnamon rolls. A little cardamom in the dough and filling enhances the bright citrus flavor without overtaking it. This dough is adaptable: You can let the dough rise in the refrigerator, instead of at room temperature, so you can serve fresh, warm rolls for breakfast without getting up at the crack of dawn to make them.