Easy

In place of apples, you can use pears here or a mixture. In fact, this is a universal crisp recipe and will work with just about any fruit. Almost needless to say, it’s great with vanilla ice cream.

The richest, most elegant dessert you can make with so little work.

If you have an ice cream machine, this is one of the fastest, easiest, most satisfying desserts you can make.

Cookies are always easy to make, but even they can use streamlining. One solution is to whip up a single dough in a food processor and finish it in different ways. This basic dough is great plain (with white sugar or brown or even molasses), but it can be varied with ginger or a mix of spices, chocolate chips, or orange. Or with one batch of dough you can make four different types of cookies—add lemon juice and zest to one-fourth of it, for example, chopped walnuts to the second, raisins to the third, and coconut to the fourth. Finally, it can produce rolled-out, cut, and decorated cookies; just chill it first to make it easier to handle. You might call this “the mother of all butter cookies.” Make these with more flour and they’re cakey; use more butter and they’re delicate, with better flavor; here, I go for the second option.

A special combination, decidedly Asian. Use fresh ginger if at all possible.

Unlike almost every other frozen dessert, granitas take no special equipment. They do take some time, however, and do not keep well, so timing is important. Figure two to three hours for this, start to finish.

I make these skewers, the creation of my friend Johnny Earles, several times each summer. The bananas, especially, drive everyone wild.

If you take soft, ripe fruit, top it with a fancy sauce like crème Anglaise, and run the whole thing under the broiler, you have a four-star dessert. But if you top the fruit with something like sweetened heavy cream, whipped just enough so that it holds some body when broiled, or sweetened sour cream—which hardly needs to be whisked—you can produce a similarly glorious dessert in less than half the time. Although this preparation is lightning-quick, it has to be constantly watched while cooking. Get the broiler hot, put the dish right under the heating element, and keep your eyes open. You want the topping to burn a little bit—it will smell like toasting marshmallows—but obviously not too much. When the topping is nearly uniformly brown, with a few black spots, it’s done. The fruit will not have cooked at all.

Look for Large Pears, just about ripe; their “shoulders” should yield to gentle pressure, but they should not be mushy. Serve these, if you like, with a dollop of sweetened whipped cream, or ice cream, or sour cream.

Nothing can match dried fruit for convenience and intensity of flavor. And when you poach an assortment with port and a few spices, the results belie the ease of preparation. This is not a summer dessert—no one would mistake this for fresh fruit—but it is delicious, low-fat, and a welcome change from heavy winter desserts. One tip: Use a port you’ll enjoy drinking (or buy a half bottle), because you’re going to use less than a third of a full-size bottle in this recipe.

Sour cherries are too acidic to eat raw but are the best for cooking. This simple preparation amounts to cherry pie without the crust.

This recipe, adapted from a classic by cookbook author Claudia Roden, is a longtime personal favorite. It becomes heavenly if you add a little rose and/or orange flower water.

A simple, traditional, and super-rich dessert.

Here’s a strawberry dessert that not only is delicious and intriguing but also can compete with plain fruit in lightness. Strawberries are sugared to juice them up a bit, then drizzled with balsamic vinegar and sprinkled with a pinch of black pepper. The result is so elegant that you’ll find it in great restaurants from here to Emilia-Romagna, the home of balsamic vinegar. It’s an ideal dessert after a heavy meal. Serve, if you like, with a few crisp cookies or a slice of pound, sponge, or angel food cake. This will not hold for any length of time; you can sugar the berries an hour or two before you want to serve them, but no longer.

This mixture of sour and whipped cream is akin to crème fraîche, but I find it more delicious. It’s killer on strawberries.

Compound Butters can be stored, well wrapped, in the freezer for two or three weeks.

This recipe and the four that follow share one basic requirement: in-season, preferably locally grown strawberries. In the event that you can’t find strawberries that match that description, substitute any other berries—blackberries, blueberries, raspberries—that are at their peak. Look for strawberries that are dark red, inside and out. The sugar will juice up any strawberries and make them sweeter of course, but it cannot work miracles.