Dessert is a course that concludes a meal. The course consists of sweet foods, such as cake, biscuit, ice cream and possibly a beverage such as dessert wine and liqueur. Some cultures sweeten foods that are more commonly savory to create desserts. In some parts of the world there is no tradition of a dessert course to conclude a meal.
Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on sweetened milk, cheese, or cream cooked with egg or egg yolk to thicken it, and sometimes also flour, corn starch, or gelatin. Depending on the recipe, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce to the thick pastry cream used to fill éclairs. The most common custards are used in custard desserts or dessert sauces and typically include sugar and vanilla; however, savory custards are also found, e.g., in quiche.
Crème caramel, flan, caramel pudding, condensed milk pudding or caramel custard is a custard dessert with a layer of clear caramel sauce.
A mille-feuille, also known by the names Napoleon in North America, vanilla slice in the United Kingdom, and custard slice, is a French dessert made of puff pastry layered with pastry cream. Its modern form was influenced by improvements made by Marie-Antoine Carême.
Apple cakes are cakes in which apples feature as a main flavour and ingredient. Such cakes incorporate apples in a variety of forms, including diced, pureed, or stewed, and can include common additions like raisins, nuts, and 'sweet' spices such as cinnamon or nutmeg. They are a common and popular dessert worldwide, thanks to millennia of apple cultivation in Asia and Europe, and their widespread introduction and propagation throughout the Americas during the Columbian Exchange and colonisation. As a result, apple desserts, including cakes, have a huge number of variations.
Banana cream pie is an American dessert pie made with bananas, egg custard and whipped cream.
A cremeschnitte, also known as vanilla slice or custard slice, is a custard and chantilly cream cream cake dessert commonly associated with the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. However, its origin is most commonly associated with a city in Slovenia known as Bled where it is called "Blejske kremšnita. This dish remains popular across Central Europe and the Balkans in various variations, all of which include a puff pastry base and custard cream.
A floating island or île flottante is a dessert consisting of meringue floating on crème anglaise. The meringue used is baked in a bain-marie. It may be served at room temperature or chilled.
An icebox cake is a dairy-based dessert made with cream, fruits, nuts, and wafers and set in the refrigerator. One particularly well-known version used to be printed on the back of boxes of thin and dark Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers.
Sponge cake is a light cake made with eggs, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Some sponge cakes do not contain egg yolks, like angel food cake, but most of them do. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in a book by the British poet Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman (1615). Still, the cake was much more like a cracker: thin and crispy. Sponge cakes became the cake recognised today when bakers started using beaten eggs as a rising agent in the mid-18th century. The Victorian creation of baking powder by British food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843 allowed the addition of butter to the traditional sponge recipe, resulting in the creation of the Victoria sponge. Cakes are available in many flavours and have many recipes as well. Sponge cakes have become snack cakes via the Twinkie.
A tipsy cake is a sweet dessert cake, made originally of "fresh sponge cakes soaked in good sherry and good brandy". The dish as prepared in England would typically have several small cakes stacked together, with the cracks between bristling with almonds. As a variety of the English trifle, tipsy cake is popular in the American South, often served after dinner as a dessert or at Church socials and neighbourhood gatherings. It was a well known dessert by the mid 19th century and was included Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management in 1861.
Pie in American cuisine evolved over centuries from savory game pies with inedible free-standing crusts. When sugar became more widely available women made simple sweet fillings with a handful of basic ingredients. By the 1920s and 1930s there was growing consensus that cookbooks needed to be updated for the modern electric kitchen. New appliances, recipes and convenience food ingredients changed the way Americans made iconic dessert pies like key lime pie, coconut cream pie and banana cream pie.
Icebox pies are no-bake pies including ice cream pies, chiffon pies, and classic cream pies like key lime pie, lemon ice box pie, chocolate pudding pie, grasshopper pie and banana cream pie. The crust can be a crumb crust or blind baked pastry. They are associated with the cuisine of the Southern United States.
