// sweets

This Italian apple torte is easy to make, and delicious. Cooking the apples first helps concentrate the flavor and remove moisture, so the cake doesn't get soggy. The lemon zest, although only a half teaspoon is used, is an essential ingredient - you can really taste it in the apples.

An ice cream loving friend was in town this weekend, giving me the perfect excuse to make this batch of butter pecan ice cream. Butter pecan is one of my all time favorite flavors. In this recipe the butter flavor comes in the custard base, achieved by browning the butter first before adding the other ingredients.

 I have an icing for you which not only takes jiffy to make, but is equally yummy to other versions. This icing is from Indian Cooking author – Tarla Dalal.

We recently came across an intriguing recipe for strawberry mousse cake in Martha Stewart Living and decided to skip the cake part and just make the strawberry white chocolate mousse. It was fabulously cool and rich, just the dessert for a warm spring evening. The following recipe is modified slightly. I found we didn't need as many strawberries as the magazine's recipe suggested. Also, we served the mousse with some remaining strawberry purée on top. The purée is not sweetened and adds a lovely mildly tart balance to the rich mousse.

Cannoli are known as Italian-American pastries, although the origin of cannoli dates back to Sicily, specifically Palermo, where it was prepared during Carnevale season, and according to lore, as a symbol of fertility. The cannoli is a fried, tube-shaped pastry shell (usually containing wine) filled with a creamy amalgamation of sweetened ricotta cheese, chocolate, candied fruit or zest, and sometimes nuts.

With this blueberry frozen yogurt recipe, you can use either fresh or frozen blueberries, though you might want to lean to the frozen as you are going to freeze them anyway, and the frozen berries are usually cheaper. The tartness of the yogurt seems to just intensify the flavor of the blueberries, and a little cinnamon adds a touch of spice.

While on one hand you have immensely labor intensive yet traditional Indian sweets like Gulab Jamun , on the other hand you have ridiculously simple ones, which don’t feel like sweets/desserts though they are!  Take this Shrikhand for instance. Rich and creamy yogurt sweetened with aromatic spices added and saffron lending its golden hues to it. It looks and tastes like a total winner yet its effortless to make.
I used fat free Greek Yogurt making this low calorie yet nutritious dessert.  This Indian dessert Shrikhand is a gift from the Gujarati and Maharashtrian cuisine.

Baklava is a delicious phyllo pastry popular in Middle Eastern countries. Its supposed origins are Turkish, dating to the Byzantine Empire (or even further), though many cultures claim it for their own. Many Greek and Lebanese restaurants serve it, and it is now a featured dessert of several former Ottoman countries. In baklava, layers of crisp phyllo dough alternate with a sugary spiced nut mixture, and the whole thing is then soaked in fragrant sweet syrup made with honey, lemon and cinnamon. It's an exotic and decadent treat to be sure.