Putting peanuts into a glass bottle of Coke (or Dr Pepper) is a Southern US tradition that many grew up with. If you didn’t grow up with that tradition, you can try it yourself or simply bake up a batch of Sprinkle Bakes‘s Coca-Cola Cupcakes with Salted Peanut Butter Frosting for a taste of these two flavors together. The chocolate cupcakes are made with real Coke and have a tender crumb and a nice cola sweetness to them. They’re topped with a peanut butter buttercream frosting that is sprinkled with sea salt to ensure that you get the same salty edge that the peanuts bring to that bottle of Coke.
Banana bread is always a great recipe to bake when you have some ripe bananas on hand, but if you’re looking to make something a little more elegant with those bananas, you might want to take on The Banana Crepe Cake with Yogurt and Walnut Butterscotch from Smitten Kitchen. This crepe cake is made by stacking up layers of banana crepes that are held together with a cream cheese yogurt filling. As though that combination doesn’t sound good enough, the whole cake is covered with a deliciously sweet walnut butterscotch topping. Breakfast, brunch or dessert, this treat is banana bread taken to a whole new level.
The Bacon and Mushroom Muffins at Jungle Frog Cooking are a good reminder that muffins can be savory, as well as sweet, and a savory muffin can be just as nice alongside your breakfast as a blueberry muffin can be. These muffins are made with bacon, olive oil, mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. They’re easy to put together, but more importantly, they’re a good base for other savory muffins. A savory muffin made with olive oil makes a great base for all kinds of savory combinations.
Dulce de leche is a rich caramel made by caramelizing sweetened condensed milk, and it is not something that you would think would be easy to “vegan-ize” and eliminate all of the dairy in it. Will Cook for Friends took up this challenge and put together a batch of Vegan Dulce de Leche Salted Caramel Chocolate Tartlets. The tarts use coconut milk, which is rich enough to give a lot of body to the caramel, as the base for the dulce de leche. This is used as a filling in vegan tart shells and topped with a layer of chocolate and a sprinkling of sea salt to serve.
Meyer Lemon Bread Pudding, from Bijouxs, is a citrusy take on a classic dessert. The bread used in the bread pudding is topped with a generous layer of homemade Meyer Lemon Curd before a lemon-infused custard mixture is poured on top and the dish is baked. The result is just as comforting as a more traditional bread pudding recipe, but it has a bright flavor that is perfect for springtime celebrations and brunches. The recipe could also be made with regular lemons and lemon curd if you can’t find Meyer lemons in your area or are looking for a way to make this recipe when Meyer lemons aren’t in season.
Easter may be over for this year, but the Easter Chick Cookies that Diamonds for Dessert made for the holiday are cute enough that you could get away wit making them any time. The cookies themselves are lemon honey butter cookies, and the dough is rolled into balls that are pressed together to form the chick bodies. They are also rolled in yellow-tinted shredded coconut before baking to give the chicks a little fuzz. Once they’re baked, all you need to do is add some little chocolate feet, a teeny tiny beak and a couple of eyes and your chicks are ready to show off – and eat!
The Pastry Affair‘s S’mores Cupcake look like a perfectly indulgent version of the campfire classic. Each tender chocolate cupcake has a graham cracker crust at its base, as that is a crucial component of a s’more. The cupcake is topped with a thick chocolate glaze and a puff of marshmallow meringue. Don’t forget to toast the meringue with a kitchen torch to get that toasted flavor into this s’more creation. These are definitely gourmet s’mores at their finest and a slightly better fit for a dinner party than the campfire version.
Another s’mores infused treat can be found in the Mini S’mores Cookies at Two Peas and Their Pod. These bite sized cookies include graham cracker crumbs, mini chocolate chips, and little marshmallow Mallow Bits, all of which combine to give thee cookies that unforgettable s’mores flavor. Each one is topped with a little piece of Hershey’s chocolate (the standard for campfire s’mores) to complete the look.
I’m sure I’m not the only one with some blood oranges still tucked away in my kitchen, and if you also have a few on hand, you’ll definitely want to try making a batch of Blood Orange Frozen Yogurt, like Kitchen Konfidence did recently. Frozen yogurt is surprisingly easy to make at home. Blood orange juice and sugar are reduced to form a thick, intense syrup which is folded into full fat greek-style yogurt. The resulting dessert is smooth, creamy and packs a lovely blood orange flavor. You’ll want an ice cream maker for the best results, but recipes like these are good motivation to add one to your Amazon wish list.
Banana cream pies and coconut cream pies are both classics, no matter how you slice them. The Coconut Banana Cream Tarts at Lauren’s Latest combine the flavors of both of these pies into a hybrid dessert sure to please fans of both varieties of cream pie. The base for these tarts is a coconut-infused pudding that is topped with slices of fresh banana. A layer of whipped cream and a sprinkling of coconut finish these off and make them just about irresistible. The tarts – or mini pies, if you prefer – are baked in individually sized tart pans for single serving desserts, and could easily be adapted to a single large tart
Chocolate covered matzoh is a favorite treat for many of my friends at Passover, but it is only recently that that particular candy has started to seem a little more exciting as people take it a little more gourmet. The Matzo Toffee with Fleur de Sel that Whisk and Whimsy made up is a good example. A layer of buttery homemade toffee is spread over the top of matzoh crackers and allowed to set up, then spread with a layer of melted chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt. It delivers a lot of crunch, as well as a mouthwatering salty-sweet combination and a definitely upgrade from many versions of chocolate matzoh you’ve tried before.
Another salt-topped dessert comes from Stylish Cuisine, who baked up a batch of Salted Chocolate Caramel Cookie Bars. These rich bar cookies have a tender shortbread cookie base that is topped with a thick layer of chocolate caramel. The caramel is made from scratch with a generous amount of cream and quite a bit of chocolate. The caramel would actually be very tasty on its own, but when paired with a sprinkling of sea salt and the slightly crunchy shortbread crust, it is downright irresistible.
Cannoli are desserts that consist of a fried tube of pastry filled with a rich cream. They’re delicious, but anyone who really loves them will tell you that they’re only good when they’re freshly made. One way to ensure that your cannoli are fresh is to make your own. Vintage Mixer made some Homemade Cannoli with Mascarpone Cream that look even better than most bakery versions. The thin cannoli shells take a little bit of work when making the dough, and need to be formed around metal cannoli forms to get that perfect shape when they’re fried, but that first bite makes all the work worth it. If you’re not going to eat them right away, just make the shells and store then in an airtight container for a couple of days. Adding the filling at the last moment before serving will ensure that the shells stay crisp and fresh.
One way to get giant, bakery-style cookies at home is to bake your cookies in a muffin top pan rather than dropping the dough directly onto a baking sheet. This is exactly how Picky Palate got her Giant Peanut Butter Cup Marshmallow Cookies to look picture perfect. These cookies have marshmallow bits and mini chocolate chips in the dough and are finished off with the addition of several mini peanut butter cups. They’re decadent (partly because they’re so generously sized!) and very addictive. You can try the same technique with other cookie doughs when you want a thicker, perfectly round cookie, too.
Rhubarb is a beautiful spring fruit that has a unique flavor, but is often paired with strawberries or other berries in desserts. Eat Little Bird‘s Rhubarb Custard Tea Cake beautifully showcases rhubarb, both its color and flavor. The dessert is a yellow cake that has a layer of custard that bakes right in the middle of it, giving you a dessert that is layered when it comes out of the oven and is ready to serve with no extra preparation. The rhubarb is arranged on the top of the cake batter before baking, so that when the cake is finished you see a pinwheel of pink stalks on top and get some cake, rhubarb and vanilla custard in every slice.
The name The Best and Creamiest Chocolate Ice Cream You’ll Every Have”, which Cafe Fernando gave to a recent ice cream creation posted at A Cup of Jo, sets a very high bar for this ice cream recipe. If it tastes even half as good as it looks, however, that name is probably right on and it doesn’t even require the use of an ice cream maker. It is made with sweetened condensed milk as the base and gets all of its chocolate flavor from bittersweet chocolate, cocoa powder and a hint of espresso that makes the chocolate flavor seem even darker. It’s difficult to scoop because it doesn’t quite freeze solid – but you’ll probably be eating it with a spoon straight out of the container anyway.
A good cup of tea can always use a cookie and Brownie Bites‘ Browned Butter Cardamom Tea Cookies make a very nice pairing with many teas. These very simple cookies start out with a generous amount of browned butter and end up as small rounds coated generously with confectioners’ sugar that melt in your mouth when you take a bite. The cookies also have vanilla and cardamom in them, both of which work very nicely with the browned butter. The basic recipe is also a great jumping off place for playing with other spice and flavor combinations.
The Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Devil’s Food Cheesecake that Sprinkles Bakes cooked up is over the top – in a good way, of course. The dessert starts out with a layer of chocolatey Devil’s Food Cake. That cake layer is topped with a layer of cheesecake, which is actually baked separately and stacked on top of the cake. A layer of eggless chocolate chip cookie dough is then placed on top of that (recipes for a lot of dough and just a thin layer are given) and the cake is frosted with a chocolate molasses buttercream. This cake takes a little bit of time to assemble and can be made over the course of a few days, but the effort is well worth it because it will definitely wow anyone who gets a slice.
The Blackberry Goat Cheese Tart from The Pastry Affair is a very versatile tart because it is both sweet and savory, so it crosses the line from dinner to dessert. The tart has a basil-infused crust made with a blend of all purpose and whole wheat flours. It is filled with a creamy goat cheese mixture and topped with fresh, juicy blackberries. If you leave out the berries, you definitely have a more savory tart on your hands, but with sweet berries and a drizzle of honey, you have a beautiful tart that offers something a little different (but still sweet) for dessert.
Fans of the sweet Biscoff speculoos cookie spread will want to bookmark Have Cake Will Travel‘s Speculoos Baked Doughnuts. These light yeast donuts are made with the brown sugar cookie spread in the batter, along with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and white pepper for a gingerbread flavor. The donuts are baked, not fried, and they’re also made with whole grain flour. They’re topped off with a speculoos-flavored chocolate ganache that makes them seem very indulgent – so indulgent that you might not realize that these delicious donuts are also vegan!
The Cinnamon Raisin Peanut Butter Cookies that Peanut Butter Boy baked up recently sound like a delicious twist on a classic peanut butter cookie. What’s even better about them is that they are unusually fast and easy to make, and they’re completely gluten free. The cookies get most of their body from peanut butter and sugar, to which eggs are added to give the cookies some structure. They’re a little bit more tender than your average peanut butter cookie (I’ve made this type before) but at least as satisfying when you take a bite and find them melting in your mouth.
Jules Food‘s Rose Shortbread Cookies with White Chocolate are beautiful cookies that are a lovely treat to celebrate the spring with. The buttery shortbread cookies are flavored with vanilla and rose extracts, so that they have a soft and floral fragrance. Finely chopped edible rose petals add a finishing touch to the cookies by adding a few bits of color throughout the shortbread. White chocolate can be drizzled over the tops of the cookies or spread into a thin layer on the bottom of each piece.
The Ricotta Pound Cake with Blood Orange Filling from Creative Culinary is a lovely variation on a classic pound cake. It’s dense and tender, with the ricotta cheese contributing a lot of moisture to it. The cake is layered with blood orange curd, then topped off with a whipped cream mascarpone frosting and candied blood orange slices for a stunning presentation. This post is also full of high altitude baking advice and encouragement.
Grapefruit doesn’t make it in to cakes, pies and other baked goods as often as other citrus fruits do, even though they can add a great flavor to many dishes. Homesick Texan‘s Ruby Red Grapefruit Pecan Cake is a perfect example. The sweet-tart juice of the grapefruit adds a bright, zesty flavor to this sheet cake, which also contains cinnamon and a handful of pecans. The cake is topped with a grapefruit cream cheese frosting, to further highlight that ruby red grapefruit flavor. Like most citrus cakes, you’re going to want to use fresh grapefruit juice and zest for the best results in this recipe.
