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.
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit, nuts, fruit preserves, brown sugar, sweetened vegetables, or with thicker fillings based on eggs and dairy. Savoury pies may be filled with meat, eggs and cheese or a mixture of meat and vegetables.
An apple pie is a pie in which the principal filling is apples. Apple pie is often served with whipped cream, ice cream, custard or cheddar cheese. It is generally double-crusted, with pastry both above and below the filling; the upper crust may be solid or latticed. The bottom crust may be baked separately ("blind") to prevent it from getting soggy. Tarte Tatin is baked with the crust on top, but served with it on the bottom.
A custard pie is any type of uncooked custard mixture placed in an uncooked or partially cooked crust and baked together. In North America, "custard pie" commonly refers to a plain mixture of milk, eggs, sugar, salt, vanilla extract and sometimes nutmeg combined with a pie crust. It is distinctly different from a cream pie, which contains cooked custard poured into a cooled, precooked crust. In the United Kingdom, the comical or political act of pieing is conventionally done with a "custard pie". Some common custard pies include pumpkin pie, lemon and buttermilk chess pie, coconut cream pie, and buko pie. True custard is defined as a liquid thickened with eggs. The often large number of whole eggs in custard pie make it very rich.
A butter tart is a type of small pastry tart highly regarded in Canadian cuisine. The sweet tart consists of a filling of butter, sugar, syrup, and egg, baked in a pastry shell until the filling is semi-solid with a crunchy top. The butter tart should not be confused with butter pie or with bread and butter pudding.
Chess pie is a dessert with a filling composed mainly of flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and sometimes milk, characteristic of Southern United States cuisine.
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.
Pecan pie is a pie of pecan nuts mixed with a filling of eggs, butter and sugar. Variations may include white or brown sugar, cane syrup, sugar syrup, molasses, maple syrup, or honey. It is commonly served at holiday meals in the United States and is considered a specialty of Southern U.S. origin. Most pecan pie recipes include salt and vanilla as flavorings. Pecan pie may be served with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream or hard sauce.
Bougatsa is a Greek breakfast food, or mid-morning snack, or midday snack. Bougatsa has several versions with their own filling, with the most popular the bougatsa krema that has semolina custard filling used as a sweet food and dessert.
Sweet potato pie is a traditional dessert, originating in the Southern United States. It is often served during the American holiday season, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas in place of pumpkin pie, which is more traditional in other regions of the United States.
Custard tarts or flan pâtissier/parisien are a baked pastry consisting of an outer pastry crust filled with egg custard.
A bean pie is a sweet custard pie whose filling consists of mashed beans, usually navy bean, sugar, eggs, milk, butter and spices. Common spices and flavorings include vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. Variations can include cloves, ginger, pumpkin pie spice and lemon extract.
Pumpkin pie spice, also known as pumpkin spice, is an American spice mix, originally developed for flavoring the filling of a pumpkin pie. It does not include pumpkin as an ingredient.
Pumpkin soup is a usually 'bound' (thick) soup made from a purée of pumpkin. It is made by combining the meat of a blended pumpkin with broth or stock. It can be served hot or cold, and is a common Thanksgiving dish in the United States. Various versions of the dish are known in many European countries, the United States and other areas of North America, in Asia and in Australia. Pumpkin soup was a staple for the prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prison camps during the Vietnam War.
A pumpkin is a cultivated winter squash in the genus Cucurbita. The term is most commonly applied to round, orange-colored squash varieties, but does not possess a scientific definition. It may be used in reference to many different squashes of varied appearance and belonging to multiple species in the Cucurbita genus.
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.
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.
The Dickinson pumpkin is a cultivar of Cucurbita moschata. The majority of canned pumpkin in the United States is made from Dickinson pumpkin, making it the most common source of pumpkin pie filling.
