Fresh Strawberry Recipes

A classic dish, these buttermilk waffles are upgraded with the addition of a few fresh strawberries on top.

Pastry chef Michelle Polzine makes her riff on strawberry shortcake with sweet, intensely flavored Seascape strawberries and fragrant Meyer lemon cream. But Seascapes and Meyer lemons overlap seasonally for only a few weeks. Once they're gone, Polzine says, standard lemons are also terrific.

Pastry chef Deanie Fox makes this fluffy granita with buttermilk, which is low in fat, high in calcium and easy to digest. She spoons the creamy, tangy ice over lightly sweetened strawberries, a vitamin C-loaded fruit.

For those who may be a little scared to try gluten-free pastries, these little tarts are the perfect place to start. "Whenever I make pastries, I'll often blend unrefined cane sugar in an upright blender to achieve a finer texture–something closer to powdered sugar than super-fine cane sugar," blogger Emma Galloway says. "This helps to evenly distribute it throughout the dough, and you are left with a much nicer texture and look in the end product."

Pastry chef Bill Corbett of Absinthe Brasserie & Bar in San Francisco harvests his own fennel pollen for this dessert by hanging wild fennel flowers upside down; as they dry, the pollen falls into a container below.

Elisabeth Prueitt invented this exceptional, flaky dessert, made with a rough puff pastry, for San Francisco's Tartine Bakery. 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.

These strawberries, macerated in lime and honey, become a bracing summer dessert when served over a scoop of lemon sorbet. The whole thing can also go into the blender with a shot of rum to make an excellent frozen daiquiri.

Here we serve the zabaglione hot when it's just made, but if you want to prepare the dish ahead of time, mix the zabaglione with whipped cream and refrigerate it as described in the first variation below.

Hungry Mother, in the Yankee bastion of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a leader in the national Southern-restaurant trend. Pastry chef Heather Tirrell uses buttermilk to make the ricotta she piles on graham tartlet shells. But any good, store-bought ricotta would be fine, she says.

In his version of no-bake cheesecake, baker and cookbook author Kamran Siddiqi beats melted white chocolate and citrus zest into the creamy filling for a deep, decadent flavor.

This dessert is a little cup of heaven.

For her brilliant dairy-free tarts, blogger Sarah Bolla of Lemon Fire Brigade makes an agave nectar-sweetened lemon cream with silken tofu.