Red, White and Blue Desserts

These terrific recipes include red velvet cake with cream cheese ice cream and classic blueberry cobbler.

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Strawberry Tart with Flaky Pastry

Elisabeth Prueitt invented this exceptional, flaky dessert, made with a rough puff pastry. She cuts the pastry into a precise circle and weighs it down during baking to create an elegant base for sliced strawberries and whipped cream. The adaptable crust can be topped with almost any seasonal fruit.

4th of July Desserts

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Coconut Cake with Saffron Cream

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Saffron's earthy yet sweet flavors make the spice versatile enough to work in both savory dishes and desserts. Here, Tyler Brown uses saffron to flavor the pastry cream for his moist, airy take on coconut cake. Instead of making a classic round, Brown bakes the cake in a 9-by-13-inch pan and cuts it in half, then stacks the layers to make a handsome rectangle.

Delicious Dessert Recipes

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Honeyed Yogurt and Blueberry Tart with Ginger Crust

John Kernick

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Melissa Rubel Jacobson mixes creamy yogurt with honey so it's deliciously sweet and tangy, then she spreads it in a graham-cracker crust spiced with bits of crystallized ginger and tops it with plump blueberries.

Pies and Tarts

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Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Ice Cream

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Southern red velvet cake is usually a tall layer cake, slathered with cream cheese icing and studded with pecans. In this deconstructed version, the cake is low (like a torte), the pecans are coated in caramel to make pecan praline and the cream cheese icing is transformed into cream cheese-flavored ice cream.

Classic All-American Recipes

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Coconut Arborio Rice Pudding

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Arborio rice is great for Stephanie Prida's pudding, because the plump grains stay perfectly firm and chewy.

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Marilyn Batali's Blackberry Pie

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While walking in Galicia with Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali spotted a bush full of ripe blackberries, his "favorite fruit in life," and recalled filling the back of his parents' station wagon with buckets of blackberries when he was growing up in Seattle. After getting his mother, Marilyn, to e-mail him her recipe, Mario prepared this luscious pie.

Summer Produce Guide

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Manhattan Ice Cream Float

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Gabriel Frasca makes his own bourbon ice cream and cherry syrup for this clever riff on a Manhattan. For his superquick version, he blends vanilla ice cream with bourbon and uses a high-quality black cherry soda like Stewart’s or IBC.

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Almond Semifreddo with Caramelized Apples

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Chef Tom Colicchio has made his restaurant Craft into a huge brand, which has helped his colleagues share in the limelight. Karen DeMasco, who cowrote The Craft of Baking with cookbook author Mindy Fox, is the former pastry chef at Craft and is known for recipes that are classically elegant yet approachable, like this supercreamy almond semifreddo ("half-frozen") topped with warm caramelized apples.

Delicious Desserts

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Blueberry Cobbler

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Here's a simple-as-can-be, not-too-sweet version of this homey dessert and breakfast dish.

4th of July Desserts

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Raspberry Gelatin with Nectarines

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This silky, sophisticated fruit gelatin is an ideal dessert for a late-summer day.

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Miss Myra's Banana Pudding

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Four generations have carefully guarded this recipe as the perfect finish to the barbecued chicken with white sauce dinner for which Miss Myra’s Pit Bar B-Q, near Birmingham, Alabama, has been famous for, running on three decades now. Enjoy. It’s dessert heaven. —Andrew Zimmern

Classic American Recipes

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Blackberry Fool with Calvados

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A classic British dessert of pureed fruit folded into whipped cream, a fool is one of the first things Peter Ting learned to make after moving to England in 1976. To give this one a little extra sophistication, he macerates (soaks) half the blackberries overnight in Calvados, then tops the fruit with dollops of whipped cream he's mixed with blackberry puree.

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Red, White and Blue Desserts

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Strawberry Tart with Flaky Pastry

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Coconut Cake with Saffron Cream

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Honeyed Yogurt and Blueberry Tart with Ginger Crust

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Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Ice Cream

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Coconut Arborio Rice Pudding

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Marilyn Batali's Blackberry Pie

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Manhattan Ice Cream Float

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Almond Semifreddo with Caramelized Apples

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Blueberry Cobbler

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Raspberry Gelatin with Nectarines

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Miss Myra's Banana Pudding

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Blackberry Fool with Calvados

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