Mediterranean Desserts Recipes

Can we talk about how most healthy dessert recipes are, well… kind of boring? I mean, fruit with yogurt is fine, but it doesn’t exactly make your dinner guests gasp. That’s exactly why I developed these honey cardamom poached pears with mascarpone — a dessert that looks like it walked out of a Michelin-starred restaurant … Read more

It was a July morning — July 14th, 2019, to be exact — and I was standing in my yiayia’s kitchen in Chania, Crete, watching her do something I had never seen before. She was tearing fresh basil leaves, one by one, into a small pot of simmering sugar water, humming to herself, completely unbothered … Read more

The thing that makes semolina cake (basbousa/revani) unlike any other baked dessert is the granule structure of semolina itself. Coarse durum wheat semolina — um, as opposed to fine semolina, which is a different animal entirely — has a starch matrix that gelatinizes during baking but remains slightly open at a microscopic level.

Let me tell you about the smell. Galaktoboureko (Greek custard pastry) has a very specific smell when it’s baking — butter, vanilla, and just the beginning of caramelization from the phyllo crust — and the first time I smelled it again as an adult after years away from Crete, I stopped completely still in the … Read more

There is a moment in my yiayia’s kitchen in Chania that I have never written about publicly — until now. I was maybe eight years old, and she had a French friend visiting: Madame Colette, the wife of a marine engineer who’d been stationed in Crete in the 1970s and never fully left the island. … Read more

The honey syrup is equally deliberate: soaking hot Greek honey donuts in room-temperature syrup (not boiling!) creates a thin, lacquered coating rather than a soggy one. This is a point of genuine obsession for me, honestly. I have ruined many batches by being impatient.

My friend Leila has exactly one rule about dessert: “if it’s not chocolate, it needs to be worth it.” She is a tough audience. So when I brought my third attempt at Olive Oil Cake with Citrus Glaze to her kitchen in November 2022 and she took a bite, put down her fork, and said … Read more

She made it in the shallow tapsi that lived on the second shelf, and she pressed the surface smooth with the back of a wet spoon — a technique she said her own mother had shown her. ‘Το χαλβά δεν συγχωρεί βιασύνη,’ she told me. The halva does not forgive hurry. I tested that warning thirty-two times developing this recipe, and I can confirm: she was absolutely right about the hurry, and completely correct about everything else.

This almond flour cake with spring berries is my tribute to that memory — and my own evolution of it. I’ve made this recipe over 40 times across fifteen years of testing. I’ve added the berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries in various combinations), brightened it with lemon zest, lightened it with separated egg whites, and landed on something I think would make my yiayia nod with approval. It’s naturally gluten-free, deeply moist, shatteringly tender, and it comes together in one bowl. No stand mixer. No complicated steps. Eight secrets, and I’m giving you all of them.

The memory is specific enough that I can still smell it. Late August, 1994 — I was ten years old — and I had climbed the stone steps to my yiayia’s kitchen in Chania before anyone else in the house was awake. She was already at the stove. The light through the shutters was the … Read more