Dessert

Who can resist bringing home an entire flat of ruby-colored strawberries fresh from the fields? Once cereal has been garnished, jams have been made, and the whole family has nibbled a few out of the bowl, you need a plan for the rest. Baking with strawberries is a great way to use up imperfect fruit. Fan sliced berries artistically in the bottom of a 9-inch layer cake pan. They’ll be the showpiece when the dessert is turned upside down after baking. Cool the cake before you do this. If it’s too hot, the juicy topping will slide off; too cold and it might stick.

Sake lends sweetness to the cream, plus a subtle nutty top note that complements the brittle. For a more colorful dessert, prepare the brittle with half regular sesame seeds and half black sesame seeds. The brittle can be made up to two days in advance and stored in an airtight container. 

To make a larger crisp that serves 10, double all the ingredients, use a 13 x 9-inch baking pan, and bake for 55 minutes at 375 degrees, without increasing the oven temperature. If making an apple crisp, we recommend equal quantities of Granny Smith and McIntosh apples. Peel, core, and cut apples and pears into one-inch chunks. Peel, pit, and cut nectarines, peaches, and plums into half-inch wedges. If using plums, add one tablespoon quick-cooking tapioca to the fruit mixture. Half a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger makes a nice flavor addition to all the fruits.

This quick variation on our Dutch Apple Pie eliminates the pie crust, allowing you to have dessert on the table in less than an hour. 

Americans have turned biscotti into a softer, richer, cakier cookie than it's supposed to be. Real biscotti (and all of the twice-baked cookies) contain no fat besides eggs. They're meant to be hard so you can dip them into sweet wine.

The custard here makes a very thin layer, which is studded with pine nuts and squares of dark chocolate. One day recently I was just about to make this tart and remembered that one of my guests is allergic to chocolate. I quickly pulled some candied orange rind from the pantry shelf and snipped half a dozen pieces into the tart instead of the chocolate (I doubled the pine nuts). It was a huge success. Because the tart is so thin, you don't think it's going to pack the flavor it does. The recipe comes from French-born chef Antoine Bouterin, a master of culinary understatement.

I called Nekisia Davis, the owner of Early Bird Granola, to see if she would divulge the recipe for the granola I had tasted in the store. I knew Ms. Davis from when she was a manager at Franny’s restaurant, where she used to concoct amaro from roots, stems and leaves. She gave me the proportions, emphasizing that it’s the balance of sweet and salty that makes her granola like health-conscious crack. But how did you come up with the idea to use olive oil? I asked. “I put olive oil in everything,” she said. “I make French toast in olive oil. I put it on toast with jelly.

Beneath a creamy layer of tapioca pudding lurks a silky strawberry base. Ground fennel seeds perk up the flavor of the fruit.

OVER the years, I’ve described cobblers, crisps, betties, free-form tarts and just about everything else I could think of to keep people from having to tackle the classic pie. A pie crust in itself is not much of a challenge, but many home cooks fear or fail at transferring the crust from countertop to pie plate.