Dessert Recipes

Use your favorite cookie cutters to create these delicious and interesting shaped cookies!

Oven baked sweet plantains slice ripe plantains on the bias and roast in a hot oven until golden, caramelized, and candy-sweet. A two-ingredient, no-fry side.

Old-fashioned sour cream cookies with nutmeg, rolled and cut into rounds with a sugar-sprinkled top. Soft, tender, and lightly spiced with a big-batch yield of 60 cookies.

Applesauce walnut cake made from golden butter cake mix with applesauce, cinnamon, and black walnuts, frosted with mocha frosting. A two-layer shortcut cake with deep autumn flavor.

Basic pastry pie crust: four-ingredient single crust from flour, salt, vegetable shortening, and cold water. The simplest flaky pastry to master for homemade pies and tarts.

Classic roll-and-cut butter cookies with brown sugar, vanilla, and just 7 ingredients. A versatile dough for cutout shapes, including a pink candy cane twist variation.

Single-crust pastry pie shell with margarine, blind-baked at high heat until golden in 10 minutes. A basic flaky pastry that works as a base for cream pies, custards, and fruit fillings.

Lower calorie pie shell with less shortening than traditional crusts. Three simple ingredients, one hour chill, and a flaky crust for any pie recipe.

Elegant French layer cake with genoise, fresh strawberries, buttercream, and crème fraîche whipped cream. This show-stopping dacquoise is soaked with Framboise liqueur.

A quick microwave brownie made with Alba chocolate mix and artificial sweetener for a low-calorie chocolate fix. Mix, microwave for 7 minutes, and you're done. Just 6 simple ingredients.

Cassata Napoletana layers thin sponge cake with cherry preserves, rich Neapolitan custard, chopped walnuts, and candied fruit. A no-bake Italian celebration cake that chills to set.

Ritz crackers sandwiched with peanut butter and dipped in melted chocolate. A 3-ingredient no-bake treat that's salty, sweet, crunchy, and ridiculously addictive.

Easy Bake Oven chocolate cake made from scratch with just six pantry ingredients. A simple homemade mix replacement so kids can bake without the store-bought packets.

Virginia Lane of Cudahy secured this recipe, with its nice complexity of flavors, in the late '50s or '60s when she lived in Iran.

Date bars with whole dates stuffed with pecans pressed into a brown sugar and sour cream batter. A touch of ginger and a dusting of powdered sugar finish them off.

Yule log cookies shaped into scored logs, baked, sliced on the diagonal, and decorated with holly icing. Spiced with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg.