A cookie or biscuit is a baked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat, and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, or nuts.
Pastry refers to a variety of doughs, as well as the sweet and savoury baked goods made from them. The dough may be accordingly called pastry dough for clarity. Sweetened pastries are often described as bakers' confectionery. Common pastry dishes include pies, tarts, quiches, croissants, and pasties.
A doughnut is a type of pastry made from leavened fried dough. It is popular in many countries and is prepared in various forms as a sweet snack that can be homemade or purchased in bakeries, supermarkets, food stalls, and franchised specialty vendors. Doughnut is the traditional spelling, while donut is the simplified version; the terms are used interchangeably.
A croissant is a French pastry in a crescent shape made from a laminated yeast dough similar to puff pastry.
A Danish pastry is a multilayered, laminated sweet pastry in the viennoiserie tradition. It is thought that some bakery techniques were brought to Denmark by Austrian bakers, and originated the name of this pastry. The Danish recipe is however different from the Viennese one and has since developed into a Danish specialty.
A bagel is a bread roll originating in the Jewish communities of Poland. Bagels are traditionally made from yeasted wheat dough that is shaped by hand into a torus or ring, briefly boiled in water, and then baked. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior.
Dough is a malleable, sometimes elastic paste made from grains or from leguminous or chestnut crops. Dough is typically made by mixing flour with a small amount of water or other liquid and sometimes includes yeast or other leavening agents, as well as ingredients such as fats or flavourings.
Kringle is a Northern European pastry, a variety of pretzel. Pretzels were introduced by Roman Catholic monks in the 13th century in Denmark, and from there they spread throughout Scandinavia and evolved into several kinds of sweet, salty or filled pastries, all in the shape of kringle.
Kipferl, kifli, kiflice, or kifle is a traditional yeast bread roll that is rolled and formed into a crescent before baking.
A peanut butter bun is a sweet bun found in Chinatown bakery shops. The bun has layers of peanut butter filling, sometimes with light sprinkles of sugar mixed with the peanut butter for extra flavor. Unlike other similar buns, the shape varies, depending on the bakery.
Bienenstich or bee sting cake is a German dessert cake made of a sweet yeast dough with a baked-on topping of caramelized almonds and filled with vanilla custard, buttercream or cream. The earliest German and Swiss recipes for the cake date to the beginning of the 20th century. The dairy cream and custard filling would have required cool storage, inaccessible to most households in earlier centuries.
A Zeeuwse bolus or Zeeuwse bolussen is a sweet pastry of Jewish origin from the Dutch province of Zeeland. They are made by baking a white bread dough rolled in dark brown sugar in a spiral shape, lemon zest and cinnamon. The shape of a bolus differs between bakers. They are often eaten with coffee, and in some parts of the region the flatter underside is covered with butter.
Concha, plural conchas, is a traditional Hispanic sweet bread with similar consistency to a brioche. Conchas get their name from their round shape and their striped, seashell-like appearance. A concha consists of two parts, a sweetened bread roll, and a crunchy topping. The most common crunchy topping flavors being chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Conchas are commonly found throughout Mexico and Guatemala in panaderias. They can now also be found in grocery stores and bakeries across the United States.
A babka is a sweet braided bread which originated in the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine. It is popular in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora. It is prepared with a yeast-leavened dough that is rolled out and spread with a filling such as chocolate, cinnamon, fruit, or cheese, then rolled up and braided before baking.
