Pastry Recipes

Old-fashioned apple dessert with brown sugar, walnuts, and raisins on the bottom, topped with cake batter and baked upside-down. Serve warm with whipped cream for pure comfort.

Traditional Slovak pirohy (pierogi) with a tender egg dough boiled and bathed in browned butter. Choose from cottage cheese, dill potato, or sweet-savory cabbage filling.

Sweet pastry dough (pate sucree) made in a food processor with butter, sugar, flour, and egg. A rich, tender, forgiving tart crust that's ideal for lemon tarts and fruit flans.

Honey-soaked almond turnovers with a cinnamon-spiced filling wrapped in oil-based pastry dough. These Greek-style travados are baked golden, then bathed in warm honey syrup for a sticky, nutty bite.

This is my go-to recipe for making pie or tart crust. It's simply the best recipe out of there. I have made both sweet and savory pies and tarts, and it turned out perfectly every time.

Easy oil pie crust with just four ingredients and no butter to cut in. This no-chill pastry rolls out fast for any single-crust pie.

German cottage cheese and oil pastry dough (Quark-Öl-Teig): a tender, no-butter base for fruit tarts, sweet rolls, and stollen made without yeast. Quick to mix and ready to roll in 20 minutes.

Soft yeast cinnamon rolls baked in muffin tins for tidy, individual swirls. A rich milk-and-butter dough gets a generous cinnamon-sugar filling, rolled, sliced, and baked golden. A from-scratch classic.

Hungarian pastry cookies made with a flaky sour cream dough, filled with prune lekvar or apricot preserves, folded into pockets, and dusted with powdered sugar.

Tiny fruit turnovers filled with a stovetop apricot-date filling and chopped nuts, wrapped in a lemon-scented cookie dough. Bite-sized pastries for holiday trays.

Big-batch cinnamon rolls baked in honey-brown-sugar caramel that pools at the bottom of the pan. Pillowy yeasted dough yields 48 rolls, ideal for brunches, bake sales, and freezer stashing.

Overnight cinnamon rolls with a refrigerator-rest yeast dough, swirled with cinnamon-brown-sugar butter and finished with vanilla butter icing. Make-ahead breakfast that bakes off fresh in the morning.

Mom's best cake doughnuts: old-fashioned fried cake doughnuts with cinnamon and nutmeg in the dough. Crisp outside, tender inside, ready in 30 minutes.

Master chef puff pastry made with classic French lamination and six single turns, building hundreds of buttery flaky layers. Restaurant-quality dough for tarts, vol-au-vents, napoleons, and palmiers.

Calas: traditional New Orleans rice fritters made from yeast-risen mashed rice dough with nutmeg, deep-fried golden and dusted with powdered sugar. A Creole street food with African roots dating to the 1700s.

Deep-fried apple fritters with diced apples in a simple egg batter, served with a homemade maple-brown sugar syrup. Crispy outside, tender and fruity inside.