Our Best Dessert Recipes & Ideas

We’ve used cardamom in the layered pastry – its spicy, smoky sweetness goes beautifully with the blackberries here! Any leftover blackberry sauce is heaven swirled into plain yogurt or over pancakes, too.

Eclairs, fruit pastries, napoleonsand other little treasures of the patisserie usually have one thing in common: pastry cream. Pastry cream, or creme patisserie, is an egg-enriched custard with flour or cornstarch for added thickening power, used to fill or layer pastries. It’s quite similar to vanilla pudding, and super easy to make. The recipe here only includes three egg yolks, considerably less than a traditional French recipe – which can include up to ten.

Summer berries are turning up and cobbler is one of our favorite ways to use them. Frozen berries are a great substitute, however, and we were impressed by Whole Foods’ bag of mixed organic berries. It included blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries, and the diversity gave this cobbler a wonderful freshness and flavor. The cream cheese filling swirled in is not too sweet, and it makes this a refreshing dessert that could easily double for a weekend breakfast.

One enduring tradition in Orthodox churches is the Easter food basket, taken on Saturday or Sunday to the church to be blessed by the priest. A typical basket includes the foods given up during Lent, like ham or sausages, eggs, butter, cheese, and a sweet eggy bread. Pascha (pronounced paska) cheese is classic Easter basket food.

We admit that this recipe started out as a bit of a stunt – what kind of fruit could we braise? But it turned out so well – better than any of our other attempts at caramelized bananas or Bananas Foster – that we’re putting it in regular rotation. Braising the bananas directly in brown sugar and brandy infuses the delicate banana flavor throughout the entire sauce, which, if you like bananas, is a treat.

Here’s the hot water bottle of desserts, warming and weirdly pink. While dried fruit simmered in wine may seem old-fashioned or unsexy, we think this is a rich luxury for an icy night. The warm wine, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper wake up summer’s stone fruits and turn them in to something more than we were expecting. Serve the fruit with a scoop of ice cream, sour cream, Greek yogurt, or fresh ricotta. Try leftovers on your oatmeal the next morning.

This isn’t a bake sale cookie, or a three-at-a-sitting treat. It’s a dressed up version of a classic, nearly underbaked so it’s still chewy, with sticky mouthfuls of gooey, boozy prune and dense chocolate. Do not attempt these without a tall glass of cold milk!

Meringues have become ubiquituously associated with the “Fat Free!” “Almost ZERO calories!” crowd of diet desserts at the grocery store, crowded into plastic tubs that cheerily advertise their low-calorie benefits. They are certainly not what we would reach for when looking for an indulgent dessert.

One of our favorite dessert party tricks is phyllo cups. You can buy those little phyllo cups, pre-shaped and crimped, out of the freezer at the grocery store. But you can get far more out of a regular package of phyllo, and it doesn’t take long to make cups in the size you want. Once baked these can be filled easily and creatively with all sorts of good things – raspberries and cream, chocolate mousse, whipped blue cheese with bacon crumbles.

Acorn squash is tremendously good for you, and when roasted it has a velvety, luxurious texture that lends itself to both spicy and sweet flavors. Fortunately, there are two halves to a squash, so I dust one with curry powder for a spicy dinner and the other with small mounds of brown sugar for a sweet dessert.I am giving measurements here, but obviously this is the most flexible sort of recipe. Adjust to your taste.

These are not difficult at all. Fruit juice is boiled with pectin and a sugar syrup is stirred in. Then it firms up overnight into a solid yet sticky bar that can be cut into individual pieces, which are rolled in sugar to give them that charming gumdrop exterior.Again, these are really sweet, so be sure to use juice that has no added sugar at all.

In fact, it never fails to amaze me that this recipe was invented by someone who did not have an electric mixer. How did they do it? How would they even think to whip egg whites this long? I wouldn’t even do this with a hand mixer – a stand mixer is what makes divinity easy.The almonds are highly recommended; this candy is so teeth-achingly sweet that it’s nice to cut it with some salt and smokiness.

These freeze well. I, regrettably, prefer them straight from the freezer. They are also the first of several Christmas candies, suitable for food gifts or the holiday buffet table, that we’ll look at in the next several weeks.Chocolate and Peanut Butter Buckeyesmakes about 13 dozen 2 lbs. powdered sugar3 cups peanut butter (smooth and not the all-natural kind)1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)1 1/2 lb. chocolate chips, semi-sweet (24 oz.

5-6 organic lemons, about 1 1/2 pounds1 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cup cold water2 cups sugar Superfine sugar (optional) Peel the lemons with vegetable peeler, taking off long, thin strips. Fill a medium sauce pan 3/4 full with water and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Add the lemon peels and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes, then drain. Repeat, using the other 1/2 teaspoon of salt. This is softening the lemon peels and taking away the residual bitterness of the white pith.

Here’s a fall flavored weekend dessert that can be assembled ahead of time and baked just before serving. It’s great for company as a finale to a homey fall meal. The earthy flavor of the sweet potatoes really comes through, pairing well with the spices and the caramely, nutty sauce. I made a batch and gave some to two sets of friends who heated it up in the microwave later. Everyone raved.

Dessert can be demanding. So much whipping, melting, baking and waiting. I’ve picked up some tips for putting together a decent “company dinner” on the double, but I can’t get the last course right . . . and I have this frustrating feeling that it’s the end of the night that everyone remembers.I’m learning that some home cooks have a stable of desserts that rely on pantry ingredients that don’t demand too much ambtion or make a mess at the last minute.

It’s the Jewish New Year so it’s time to celebrate and reflect. This weekend, since I didn’t have time to make my traditional, from scratch honey cake, I opted for a no-fail bundt cake recipe. I recently learned that the bundt pan was created by Nordic Ware here in the United States after a couple of ladies from the Minneapolis chapter of the Hadassah society asked Nordicware founders, Dave and Dotty, to make a pan similar to the ones their grandmothers used in back in Germany.

With all the talk about ice cream lately, we wouldn’t want you going out and buying cones, which often have shortening, artificial flavourings and preservatives. Here’s a very simple way of making your own. This is a great accompaniment to your original ice cream recipe that you’re submitting to the contest, don’t you think?

“I think it looks a little sad because I used my glass pie plate which is a deeper than I remembered so it doesn’t have that nice plumped up effect. It’s based on a family recipe that both my mother and my grandmother made, which we all tend to play fast and loose with. This pie combines half cooked fruit with half fresh fruit, so you can sugar and spice up the cooked part but still get the freshness of the raw fruit. ” (Thanks, Abby!

We celebrated the birthday of a Bermudian friend a few nights ago. On the menu were Dark & Stormies and Rum Cake, of course. Being with child, I did not gulp a D&S, but I did enjoy the cake. The recipe, in its original form, comes from the birthday boy’s mother in Bermuda, who gets it from Bacardi.