Ice Cream Party

Adapted from pastry chef Erin Swanson's towering dessert at the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans, the Mile High Ice Cream Pie has been a fixture of the hotel's Caribbean Room since former executive chef Louis Evans ran the kitchen in the 1970s. This simplified version uses store-bought ice cream and packed chocolate wafer cookies for a no-fuss, three-ingredient crust.

This addictive rice brittle crunch is a supersimple mix of peanut brittle and crispy rice cereal.

The fresh blueberry sauce can also be drizzled on pound cake for a quick summer dessert.

These spiced-just-right oatmeal cookies are the perfect texture for ice cream sandwiches—chewy and soft.

"I always think of my father when I think of ice cream," Lissa Doumani says. "When we were growing up, we had to have different ice creams for the kids and for Dad—we couldn't touch his stash." Carl has very specific rules about his sundaes: He loves the caramel and hot fudge sauces but refuses to add whipped cream or a cherry.

Rori Trovato of Rori's Artisanal Creamery in Santa Barbara, California, creates all kinds of ice creams. Ironically, her son, Roman, has become lactose-intolerant. "Poor guy," Trovato says. "His mom opens an ice cream shop and he can't have any!" That's why she created this dairy-free flavor.

This is an excellent grown-up version of an ice cream sundae, made with lush nectarines cooked in bourbon. The best part: the crisp, buttery pound-cake croutons.

Folding apple butter into vanilla ice cream is a great way to add elegance. Green Aisle Grocery's Adam Erace also adds grated ginger to melted chocolate to make a fast sundae topping; for a more caramel-like sauce, substitute dulce de leche for the melted chocolate.

This isn't the kind of ice cream pie you'd make for a kiddie birthday party. Instead of a plain cookie crust, Grace Parisi creates a crispy, chewy one with crumbled gingersnaps, dried pineapple and candied ginger. And instead of the usual caramel or chocolate sauce on top, she prepares a delectable mix of dulce de leche and passion fruit nectar from the supermarket.

Daniel Orr's grandmother, who he says was the best biscuit maker in Pike and Gibson counties, baked these to serve with sausage, gravy, eggs and ham to the hard-working farmhands during the summer. Daniel uses the same recipe to make this old-fashioned dessert.

When pastry chef Jacques Torres was growing up in Provence, he believed the sole reason for his family's evening walks was to eat ice cream. He still loves ice cream cones. Now the owner of an eponymous candy factory and shop in Brooklyn, Torres prepares a grown-up version at home: He twists coconut cookies into cones, coats the insides with dark chocolate (which helps keep them crisp) and fills them with ice cream.

At the Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, California, Kendra Baker uses caramel ice cream in her bonbons, which have a silky chocolate shell and flaky sea salt on top.

To make these layered, free-form sundaes quickly, use store-bought caramel or butterscotch sauce. As a variation, substitute ginger cookies for the chocolate wafers.

Like many pastry chefs, Ghaya Oliveira loves taking classic desserts, breaking them down into their components and reconfiguring them. This approach inspired Grace Parisi to transform a traditional recipe for German chocolate cake into an elegant and incredibly delicious ice cream sundae.

This exceptionally creamy ice cream relies on two unexpected ingredients: corn starch (to help thicken it) and cream cheese (to make it scoopable).

Wayne Harley Brachman, pastry chef at New York City's Dos Caminos and author of the cookbook American Desserts, says he likes "to look at things upside down and backwards." That explains his reverse sundae, with its luscious, creamy white-chocolate fudge sauce and cocoa whipped cream. He even uses chocolate ice cream, though he concedes that the traditional vanilla would be just as delicious.

Using a slightly tart apple, like a Granny Smith or Pink Lady, is key to this frozen-yogurt sundae; sautéing brings out the fruit's sweetness. The crispy, salty cheddar crisps that accompany the sundaes are as good with cocktails as they are with desserts.

"If there could ever be such a thing as healing ice cream, this would be it," says blogger Anya Kassof. Manuka honey is made exclusively by bees in New Zealand and Australia from the nectar of the native manuka tree. The honey has a very subtle taste, along with a beautiful color and texture. It’s also known to be one of the most nutritious types of honey, especially when combined with bee pollen.

Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio, says the secret to a perfect layered terrine is the "clash of color and texture."

Brown butter, made by warming butter in a skillet until deeply golden, adds a wonderful nutty flavor to this chunky, streusel-like topping. Sprinkle it on vanilla ice cream with chocolate and caramel sauces for outrageously good sundaes.

Swirling caramelized apples with dulce de leche into vanilla ice cream makes for a delicious treat.

"Every house has an herb garden," says Daniel Humm of Ticino, the southern region of Switzerland. Accordingly, he infuses roasted peaches with honey-rosemary syrup. The mascarpone in the ice cream reveals the strong Italian influence on Ticino's cuisine.

For an unusual but exceptionally easy dessert, soften a pint of vanilla ice cream, mix it with ricotta and honey, and then refreeze it. You'll want to use a premium brand of ice cream, since the quality of each ingredient is very apparent in this simple dessert.

Break-and-bake cookies, which come packaged in eight-inch squares, are the secret to these incredible ice cream sandwich bars. Simply roll out all the dough to create one giant cookie, then bake, slice and layer it with store-bought ice cream and hot fudge sauce. The best part: dipping the bars into crushed chocolate toffee candy to form a supercrunchy shell.

Pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini of New York City's Jean Georges describes his home cooking as "lazy." For these splits, he marinates bananas in rum, coats them with sugar and grills them until the outsides get hard and crackly.

Instead of making his brownies in one big pan, Atlanta chef Ford Fry bakes them in muffin cups, so each one has the perfect ratio of crusty outside to moist, fudgy interior.

Cathy Waterman's daughter Coco Kislinger launched her business, Coco Bakes, while studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris; it's where she discovered that she was both dairy- and gluten-intolerant. She sells sweets like the crisp-chewy gingersnap cookies in these ice cream sandwiches.