Fruit Dessert

A true Key lime pie should not be green!

This fritter batter may be used for sliced fresh apples or bananas, or canned pineapple.

A parfait is a great party dessert—elegant-looking but essentially quite simple. This one is really fun to put together, and I have the kids help me: they love to crack and crumble up into hundreds of pieces the big brown sugar crisp I’ve baked, then layer them in the parfait glasses (and pop lots of crumbles into their mouths too, I’ve noticed). Like the crisp, the poached apple cubes are delicious all by themselves. You want to use flavorful, tart-tasting apples that will keep their shape when cooked but soften up nicely and remain moist too. Good varieties are Greening, Granny Smith, Northern Spy, and Golden Delicious. Some of the heirloom cooking apples that orchards are growing again would be fine too—we can never have too many varieties of apples to enjoy.

Pignoli (pine nuts) are an ingredient much loved and used in Italian cooking— from savory pasta dishes and pesto to meat dishes such as bracciole and rollatini, and an infinite number of desserts. Here it is the topping of the tart, and hence its name, pignolata, lots of pignoli. For me, pignoli are delicious nuts that I recall harvesting from a cone of the big pine tree at the end of my grandmother’s courtyard in Istria. It was a humungous pine tree—or maybe I was small. My brother Franco and the other boys would climb up the tree and shake or knock down the open cones. Burrowed in the open scales of the pine cone were the oval brown-shelled nuts, which the girls would crack open with stone on stone. First we would eat our fill, then we began collecting them for cooking. That fresh, sweet flavor of pine nuts is still vivid in my mind, and to me there is nothing worse than biting into a rancid old pine nut. So make sure that you get the freshest pine nuts, which should be sweet, nutty, and buttery at the same time. Buy them in small quantities, since they are expensive; use them quickly, and if you have some left over, seal them tightly in a plastic bag and freeze them for future use. To heighten their aroma, toast them just before using—although not in this recipe, since you will be baking them.

These are my favorite kind of cakes to make: mix a batter in a bowl; put it in a pan with fruit; set the cake in the oven; remove when done—and that’s it! They’re ready to enjoy, with no fancy finishing or decorating needed. Such cakes are perfect for afternoon tea or as a simple dessert after a big dinner. But you know when I most love these cakes? In the morning—I just cut a small piece from the pan and sit down with a cup of excellent coffee, a copy of the New York Times, and my torta. It’s a great way to start the day. Simple as they are, both of these cakes have interesting, and lovely, touches: the torta invertita is (as you may have guessed) an upside-down cake. You put sugared rhubarb in the bottom of the pan, spread the batter on top, and bake. The fruit cooks and caramelizes and moistens the cake on top; then, when the torta is partly cooled, you invert the pan so the fruit turns into a glossy topping. I love rhubarb, and in this recipe I’ve incorporated a great technique I learned from my editor, Judith, who grows rhubarb in Vermont. The cut-up fruit is tossed with sugar and sits overnight, to soften and release lots of its liquid. The drained pieces go right into the cake pan, and I cook down the juices to make rhubarb syrup (to drizzle on the cake). When rhubarb isn’t available, other fruits make a great torta invertita: ripe stone fruits like apricots, nectarines, peaches, or plums; ripe pears, figs, and pineapple are good, too.

Peaches are delightful prepared this way, but apricots, cherries, or a mixture of both will yield equally good results. Serve warm in a bowl with vanilla ice cream.

In our house, where nothing goes to waste, you can bet that bread pudding is a highly esteemed dessert. This is a simple, delicious version (with a new twist that I just discovered). It is great in summer with any fresh berries—and frozen berries work fine the rest of the year. I like to use blueberries because they remain whole—especially small wild ones. I also like raspberries and other soft berries, precisely because they melt into the pudding and leave bursts of flavor where they baked. So you can experiment: firm strawberries would be nice, cut up, as would other semifirm fruits, like ripe pears. I would avoid very juicy fruits, though. I like white breads for pudding, but, as with the Peach Lasagna (following recipe), it should be a hearty homemade or country white bread, not sourdough. I don’t like sour breads in general, and certainly not for desserts. But when we were testing recipes in Vermont, we had only day-old bread that was a bit more sour than I liked, and that prompted me to develop a new twist on the recipe. There was a jug of maple syrup on the kitchen counter at my editor Judith’s house, and I decided to balance the sourness by drizzling the bread with syrup and toasting it in the oven to sweeten and caramelize it lightly. As I am sure you will agree when you taste the pudding, it’s worth using the maple syrup whether your bread is sour or not.

Literally fichi al galoppo means “galloping figs,” an intriguing name for such a simple dish. As the figs poach slowly in bubbling syrup, it sounds like galloping horses. The trick here is to cook them with enough sugar so the fruit will absorb the syrup, rather than release its own juices. When this balance is reached, the silky figs remain whole and deliciously impregnated with the syrup.

Although pumpkin is not technically a fruit, it is eaten in this sweet preparation, as many fruits are. There are many foods specially made for Día de los Muertos celebrations throughout Mexico, and this is one of the most representative. It is traditionally cooked in clay casseroles, with the seeds and strands attached, but you can also clean and dry the seeds and snack on them later.

The black zapote fruit got its name because the inside pulp is actually black like mud, but don’t be put off by the unusual color because the fruit is succulent and sweet. If you are in a place where you can get them, buy the ones that feel so soft as to seem almost spoiled, because these have the best flavor. The creamy pulp blends very nicely with the fresh orange juice and is a classic combination