Top 10: Fast and Easy Desserts

By Food & Wine
Updated May 08, 2017
Fredrika Stjärne
These terrific recipes include plum-and-honey sabayon gratins and bourbon-nectarine ice cream sundaes with pound-cake croutons.
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Mini Chocolate-Hazelnut Cheesecakes

Credit: © Fredrika Stjärne
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Grace Parisi breaks up whole, cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies in a food processor with hazelnuts and butter to create a supercrunchy crust for these delectable little cheesecakes. The cream filling in the cookies both sweetens the crust and prevents it from becoming too crumbly.

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Crunchy Peanut Butter Cookies

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Peanut butter binds these supernutty flourless cookies from Southern cook Elizabeth Woodson, a former art director at F&W.

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Apple Dumplings

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Apples baked in flaky pastry with cinnamon sugar are irresistible, especially when served with vanilla ice cream. To save preparation time, we use frozen puff-pastry sheets.

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Vietnamese Coffee Sundaes with Crushed Peanut Brittle

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The Vietnamese love drinking superstrong iced coffee combined with copious amounts of sweetened condensed milk. Joanne Chang created this simple ice cream sundae as a way to enjoy the same flavors. Shards of peanut brittle made with a generous pinch of cinnamon add great flavor and crunch.

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Molten Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Filling

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More decadent than molten chocolate cake: one filled with warm peanut butter, reveals F&W's Grace Parisi.

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Plum-and-Honey Sabayon Gratins

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This stunning plum-studded sabayon—an airy custard sweetened with clover honey and Moscato—is summer’s answer to crème brûlée. If you don’t have Moscato on hand, any honey-inflected dessert wine will do, such as Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise or a late-harvest Riesling.

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Honey-Sweetened Mascarpone with Berries and Pistachios

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Dahlia Narvaez adored the deliciously rich mascarpone cheese she ate in Umbria. "It's such a great backdrop for all the different honeys made in Italy," she says. She made this dish with delicate Umbrian wildflower honey but says stronger honeys like chestnut would also be terrific.

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Bourbon-Nectarine Ice Cream Sundaes with Pound-Cake Croutons

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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.

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No-Bake Chocolate Custard

Credit: Amy Sims
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This supersilky chocolate custard can be served slightly chilled.

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No-Bake Chocolate—Peanut Butter Cookies

Credit: Fredrika Stjärne
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Grace Parisi's crumbly, ultra-peanutty cookies require only four ingredients: puffed-corn cereal, peanut butter cups, peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles. The powdery texture of the ground cereal prevents the cookies from feeling sticky.

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