On our honeymoon in Ontario, my husband and I had pumpkin pie with a strawberry black pepper sauce. It was incredible. We happened to be honeymooning during Canadian Thanksgiving, so we lucked out and got the recipe and recreated it for our Thanksgiving with family back home in the states a month later.

My friend's mom once made a silver white cake with alternating homemade lemon and raspberry filling between the layers. It was frosted with a cream cheese frosting and covered in finely shredded coconut. Best dessert I have ever had!

This really isn't anything TOO special, but long story short: On a sunny day in a tiny port town on the eastern Italian coast, I was treated to chocolate gelato with chunks of Kinder Happy Hippos in it by a tall, blonde handsome man who was purportedly a member of the Italian version of the FBI. When I die, I will die in peace.

This dessert is so rich it should be illegal. I make it once a year for the work Christmas party. Thus, we named it Christmas in a Bowl. Made from scratch with layers of white chocolate peppermint mousse, dark chocolate pudding, and fudgy brownies. It's so darn good.

http://fauxmartha.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/christmas-in-a-bowl-is-back/

A friend made me a lemon cake with raspberry filling between the layers covered in Lemon Buttercream for my birthday. It was amazingly decorated and the most amazing thing EVER

The best dessert I've ever eaten was a fresh peach and blueberry cobbler, warm and soft on the inside, crunchy and sweet on the outside, with a big scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and, per my request, a tall glass of milk, from a restaurant in Pasadena CA. I died and went to heaven.

Creole Bread Pudding Soufflé with warm whiskey cream at Commander's Palace in New Orleans, hands down. I've eaten at many NYC fancy pants restaurants (Keller, Boulud, Colicchio, whatever) and this has burned it's delicious memory into my brain permanently.

Homemade blackberry pie, hot out of the oven, and vanilla ice cream. Every summer for many years when I was a kid.

Lemon meringue ran a close second.

On a hot day in the middle of summer I had grapefruit sorbet flavored with St. Germain- it was a revelation.

I just experienced Carnegie Deli's NY cheesecake covered in large fresh strawberries for the first time, and I can say it was hands down the best dessert I've ever had.

The salted caramel ice cream at Bi Rite Creamery in San Francisco, it is amazing. Also, my Mom's homemade kheer (Indian rice pudding).

Texas peaches

My friends' wedding cake in College Station, TX.

I was at a pizza and ice cream convention (hubs is a judge) and I had a lemon marscapone cream gelato! I've never had it since =(

Alfajores. I had them at a Peruvian restaurant years ago and found a good recipe online. The light shortbread and gooey caramelized condensed milk center goes really well with Brazilian lemonade.

coconut rice pudding, from a Thai restaurant near Honolulu. On my 6 day vacation, I ate it four times. Just the right salty/sweet combination.

I don't even like cheesecake, but within a day I ate a third of an entire cherry cheesecake from the W Hotel in Seoul. So worth it and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm making it my business to go back.

On a family vacation to Las Vegas when I was twelve, we went to a restaurant prior to a Cirque de Soleil show, and there I had the most delicious chocolate souffle I have ever come across. I have no idea what restaurant we were at, but fifteen years later, I still remember that amazing souffle...

At Po in NY. I remember thinking my salad was ok and my entree was ok, but I would have stabbed someone's hand if they came near my dessert! It was a slab of chocolate, almost like fudge and with some kind of almondy, amaretto flavor that highlighted, not masked, the quality of the dark chocolate.

Sticky date pudding, without question. I love it with chantilly cream, but it's pretty damn good with vanilla ice-cream, too.

A half a mango, topped with homemade, vanilla merigue , broiled slightly, till lightly caramel colored : SUBLIME!

Anniversary dinner with my fiance at Perilla in NYC. Delicious meal all around, but it was finished with a gooey chocolate souffle with mocha hot fudge to pour on top. I've never tasted a more perfect expression of chocolatey goodness. It was served in an espresso cup, but I could have eaten a mixing bowl full. Yummmmm!

The banana boats my mum and I used to make growing up: roasted bananas, melted chocolate chips, and broiled marshmallows, to be eaten straight off the foil-wrapped cookie sheet the very second it was just cool enough to not burn our mouths. For pure deliciousness and nostalgia, nothing compares ... not even the time-stopping chocolate chevre donuts I had the other night.

Oh man. So many.

-a passion fruit truffle at Andina in Portland, OR that made my eyes roll back into my head
-a big dish of Secret Breakfast ice cream at Humphrey Slocombe in SF
-Ina Garten's coconut cupcakes
-that amazing Peanut Butter Chocolate cake that Deb posted on Smitten Kitchen
-and on...

Can you tell I've got a sweet tooth?

Either one of the many, many apple crisps I've had over the years, or a creme brulee with a blackcurrant sauce - perfect combination and cooked to perfection.

This is definitely a hard one to pinpoint but I can at least narrow it down to a few favorites...I absolutely LOVE the silky maple cream pie at the Rockburn Pub in Quebec, I love a true creme brûlée, Barefoot Contessa Coconut cupcakes, Nutella crepes, and lastly an Acine de Pepe ambrosia style salad. My list may not be short but it definitely sweet! (Does vanilla bean cream filled French toast count as dessert?)

Some kind of pear tart from a bakery called patisserie salzburg in Rye, NY. To die for.
Creme fraiche ice cream from Aquagrill in NYC.
The BEST ice cream I've ever had.

Also, cream puff from a bakery in Tokyo.
canele from my last trip to France.

Chocolate Decadence. A dessert made by a local chocolatier, DeBrand. Sadly, it is no longer available.

I spent a summer on an archaeologica dig in Malta, a tiny hot Mediterranean island. There was a walled town in the middle of the island built in the 1200's. Along those walls, numerous restaurants and cafes took advantage of the amazing views of the whole island you could get from that high point. One of these restaurant served a homemade chocolate cake that was decadent and spectacular, and the icing perfumed the air as the chocolate melted ever so slightly in the sun. Best dessert ever, made ever so much better by environs.

The wedding cake at my friend's wedding. Never thought I'd say it about a wedding cake, but man was it good. Rich and light with the most fabulous butter cream frosting. They had tons of leftovers and sent me home with a box. The caterers literally just scooped cake and crammed it into a huge cake box. I spent the rest of the weekend eating cake straight out of that box. It was to die for.

You'll all laugh, but the best dessert I've ever had was from a Las Vegas buffet. It was an item called gianduja (which I've since looked up and discovered is an Italian hazelnut and chocolate torte). Anyway, their version was multi-layered: dense dark choc fudgey cake layer on the bottom, some type of crunchy flaky wafer-like atop that, a lighter mousse layer then a layer of ganache topped by a sprinkling of powdered choc. Oh. My. Gracious.

Frozen Orange Souffle from Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia. I bought the restaurant's cookbook for that recipe alone

Its a tie between the bite sized date pastries an old friend used to bring me (they had this wonderful, intangible flavor to the dough... almost like vanilla, but flowery like jasmine) and a black sticky rice, coconut & fresh corn pudding my Laotian friend's mother used to make.

1) Any of my mother's pies
2) The banana bread pudding from Mezzaluna in Aspen, CO
3) This amazing panna cotta I ate at a restaurant somewhere. So vague, I know. But I remember seeing it clearly on the plate, feeling the consistency on my tongue, and sighing loudly as I devoured the entire thing. I really cannot recall where I was, but that moment is burned in my brain.

i have to agree with hannaht on deb's chocolate peanut butter layer cake goodness - everyone i who tasted that cake (myself included!) swooned over it. and perhaps the first taste of real gelato i ever had in italy... yum.

French macarons/macaroons from Laduree and our wedding cake (layers of carrot cake SANS RAISINS and banana cake with cream cheese filling).

homemade blueberry crisp (martha stewart recipe) topped with vanilla ice cream

• Cassata Cake from Montilio's Bakery for my birthdays growing up
• The two desserts I ordered for dinner while sitting alone at a restaurant in Reggio Emilia
• My mother's Grapenut Custard warm from the oven
• My Sia Rose's Torta di Frutta made with prune plums

Crazy good - each and every one of them.

On my 18th birthday, my mother took me out to the 10,000 Villages buffet, which was featuring cuisine from South America that week. At the end of an extra-long table laden with an amazing variety of authentic dishes, was one plain, yellow sheet cake.

Hiding my disappointment that there wasn't anything containing copious amounts of chocolate, I took a small piece of the cake. And then I tasted it. And I could have died. It was a tres leches cake - perfectly sweet, so moist (but not soggy), light and just...

After a quick exchange of shocked looks, my mom and I agreed that this cake was the best thing we had ever tasted and proceeded to destroy the rest of the cake (luckily for the other people there, they had more).

I've tried several recipes since then and, though they've all been good, none of them have compared to the recipe they served at 10,000 Villages.

Creme Brulee, when I was twelve, the one time I went to France

Indian rice pudding at my favorite restaurant I've been going to for ten years

When my boyfriend took me out the other night for thai food, we got coconut ice cream at the end of it, which tasted amazing, but it wasn't coconutty at all. It was floral, like orange blossom water.

Jeni's ice cream

My mom made this dessert when I was a kid that I make now. It's a strawberry mousse made with whipped cream, sugar, fresh strawberries, and egg whites that you pour in a graham cracker crust and freeze. It is AMAZING.

The Paris-Brest pastry I just had in Paris last week!! Utterly divine!

Strawberry shortcake tart, with a small layer of cheesecake from a bakery in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It is no longer there, but I still think about it all the time, even though it was about 10 years ago.

Banana gelato from Zanoni Eis in Vienna. The bananas they use must be slightly green, which is how I prefer them, and it's wonderful.

Pierre Hermé macarons. I've eaten a lot of great desserts, many made by my mom, but there's a reason the line at Pierre Hermé's shop in Paris starts forming an hour before it opens. Each tiny cookie is loaded with mind-blowing flavor.

http://www.pierreherme.com/index.cgi?&cwsid=1567ph0A000108ph9769362

Pretty much you can't go wrong at San Francisco's Tartine Bakery. But the fresh seasonal fruit cream tart and especially the banana cream tart is out of this world, so amazing. The cream is DIVINE!!! I've had lot's of wonderful sweets... but I have yet to find any that top this and I've been looking ;)

Sky-high sour cream coffee cake from the White Gull Inn in Door County, Wisconsin. I had it for breakfast, but it was still the best dessert I've ever had.

the BEST dessert i ever had was a few months ago at a swanky restaurant for a bachelorette dinner.

maple creme layered with candied pecans and fresh whipped cream, served in a chilled mason jar with a hinged lid. it was the perfect consistency, not too hard or soft.

fantastic presentation in the jar, which gave me the idea to make/serve it myself that way.

it's best when followed by a couple shots of espresso.

I love sweets however I'm not into cake or brownies. I usually like some sort of chocolate or fruit crumble type of thing, however, the dessert I cannot stop thinking about recently is my grandma's rice pudding! I had some recently at a restaurant that came close to hers but I need to learn how to make it from her. (The dessert aprilheartsaaron posted sounds like it might be up my alley too!)

The best dessert I ever ate is flan made by an ex-coworker. He called it flan but it was unlike any flan I've ever eaten... it was very thick and rich and the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Even after he transferred out of our department we would still invite him to team potlucks just for the flan.

...also had to add my sister's pistachio wedding cake...yum

The baked Alaska at Oleana in Cambridge, MA. OMG it is fantastic! The passion fruit drizzle is one of the best things that I have ever tasted!!

At NINE-TEN in La Jolla here in San Diego they serve a dessert called a Half-Baked Chocolate Cake. It's amazing. It's soft and almost soupy in the middle, but the edges of the bowl are slightly cooked. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. It's the dessert I would want on my deathbed... so rich and delicious!

My grandmother's pear cobbler - home grown, home canned pears with a flaky biscuit topping.