Dessert/8 recipes

Bananas in rum caramel sauce with pineapple juice, cinnamon, and butter, served over vanilla ice cream. A quick stovetop dessert ready in 30 minutes.

Steamed persimmon pudding with cinnamon spice, raisins, and chopped almonds. Dense, moist loaf baked in a water bath and served warm with hard sauce.

Friendship-starter prune cake spiced with cinnamon and studded with chopped walnuts and stewed prunes. A moist, sourdough-tinged sheet cake from the Amish friendship-bread tradition.

Brandy snaps are a popular delightful British Christmas cookie. Crispy golden tubes filled with a brandied whipped cream. What's not to love.

Old-fashioned prune and pecan spice cake with buttermilk, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, topped with a hot buttermilk icing poured on while still baking.

Turtle pie layers a pecan-chocolate cookie crust with melted caramel, silky chocolate ganache mousse, and clouds of whipped cream. No-bake-ish dessert that pulls all the candy-bar flavors into one chilled pie.

Four-ingredient low-calorie cookies made with banana, oats, peanut butter, and baking powder. No flour, no sugar, no eggs, no butter. Just mash, mix, and bake.

This splurge-worth caramel pie, with its made from scratch caramel, is near impossible to resist. Rich and dense, the flavors of buttery caramel sing loudly in every single bite.

Classic cream cheese cheesecake sweetened with condensed milk instead of granulated sugar, brightened with lemon, finished with a baked-on sour cream layer and fresh strawberries.

Pumpkin cranberry bars with a buttery spiced cake-mix crust, tart cranberry filling, and creamy pumpkin custard topped with pecan streusel. A holiday-friendly Thanksgiving dessert that slices cleanly and feeds a crowd.

Easy coffee cake builds a quick monkey bread-style bundt from refrigerated biscuits dipped in melted butter and pecan-brown sugar, then baked into a sticky pull-apart loaf. A four-ingredient brunch shortcut for sleepy mornings.

Gift cake: a birthday sheet cake decorated to look like a wrapped present, with coconut "paper," strawberry preserves filling, and a gumdrop bow. Perfect kid's party centerpiece.

Pistachio mint cake is a green-tinted sheet cake with chocolate chips, baked in a 9x13 pan and topped with melted Andes mints spread into a glossy chocolate glaze.

Old-fashioned prune cake with buttermilk, pecans, and warm spices soaked in a boiled buttermilk-butter sauce. Needs three days to cure for the richest, most intense flavor.

Spiced pumpkin cookies with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and ginger. Soft drop cookies topped with cinnamon sugar baked in 15 minutes.

McHamburger cookies sandwich a chocolate cookie "patty" between two vanilla wafer "buns" with green-tinted coconut lettuce and yellow frosting cheese, then sprinkle sesame seeds on top. A novelty no-bake cookie kids can build themselves.