Fruit Dessert

Keep the final course sweet and simple.

A hearty, old-fashioned-style pie. Delicious with vanilla ice cream. A winner in the Bon Appétit Recipes Sweepstakes, a reader poll conducted in honor of our 50th anniversary.

Crème fraîche is a cultured cream with a rich, silky texture and a nutty, tangy flavor that's well worth seeking out for this recipe. Look for it at some supermarkets and in the dairy section of specialty foods stores. Baker's sugar, a favorite of pastry chefs, is also called superfine sugar. It measures the same as regular but dissolves more quickly. It's available at some supermarkets. You can also make your own by whizzing granulated sugar in a food processor until powdery.

In this easy dish, a little bit of almondy custard dresses up fresh fruit, making it special for company while preserving its pure goodness.

In this recipe, simple pantry ingredients come together to make a homey cake that's so tender and moist, you'll be fighting over the last piece.

Light and fluffy, these impressive desserts look, smell, and taste extraordinary — meringue gives them a cloudlike texture, while quince adds a delicious fragrance and beautiful pink hue. And they're very manageable for a small dinner party if you make your crêpes and prepare the quince ahead (see cooks' note, below). Bring them both to room temperature when you sit down to dinner; when it's time for dessert, you'll only need to beat your egg whites and assemble the soufflés for baking.

Olive oil in a dessert might seem a little odd, but try to think of it as a flavorful ingredient rather than a fat...as long as you choose a delicious extra-virgin oil. I first had something like this in Jabugo, Spain, when I ate slices of orange simply drizzled with a grassy local oil as a dessert. It was a revelation. If you want to go dairy-free in this dessert, then skip the yogurt and mix the mint in with the grapes.

Apricot season is short, but our love for the fruit endures. Pan-roasting canned apricots revives their tartness. Combined with frangipane filling, they make for one sweet dream in the middle of winter.

A perfect ending to a holiday meal, these gorgeous golden orbs are remarkably refreshing. And they will remind you why, in days past, good little children often found oranges hidden in the toes of their Christmas stockings.

Sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, these little prune tartlets (made with just five ingredients) are so delicious, they'll have everyone at the breakfast table begging for more.

The cake takes its name from the wife of Jack Turner's former headmaster, but the recipe is reportedly an ancient Scottish one. Aluminum foil stands in for the traditional newspaper.

A dream-come-true holiday dessert: so easy to assemble, yet so very impressive (and delicious, too).

Each low-cal helping serves up heart-friendly flavonoids (found in the skin).

Easily made with puff pastry, these light, thin apple tarts provide just the right amount of dessert. The skins get added to the syrupy glaze, enhancing the tarts with a bit of sweetness and the faintest blush of pink.