15 Vegetarian Desserts

The shortest distance between a craving and a bowl: five ingredients, a food processor, nothing baked and nothing watched. The avocado is not a health-food substitution here, it is the fat doing the job dairy cream normally does, which is why the recipe is fussy about buying small pebbly Hass rather than the big smooth-skinned kind that brings water where you needed fat.

Watch for: Blend the avocado smooth on its own before anything else goes in. Everything at once leaves flecks of whole fruit through it, and each one is a bite of avocado rather than of chocolate.

Neither baked nor chilled nor chocolate, and most versions served outside Thailand fail in the same place: they pour one dressing where the dish has always had two, and it is the salted half, added at the table, that stops the whole plate reading as plain coconut pudding. The fruit matters as much. The large red and green mangoes stacked by the supermarket door are fibrous whatever you do, and waiting on the counter will not change it.

Watch for: The rice is steamed, never boiled. Glutinous rice is almost pure amylopectin, so it grabs hold of itself the moment it sits in water and goes to porridge before it ever cooks through.

The one to make when the occasion needs something that looks like an occasion. Carrot cake never needed the eggs in the first place: it descends from a boiled pudding rather than a sponge, and the applesauce covers what the eggs used to. Grate the carrots on the medium holes, not the largest, or long coarse shreds stay identifiably raw all the way through the bake.

Watch for: Beat the frosting cold and stop earlier than feels right. Vegan cream cheese is held together by starch and gums rather than dairy protein, so it loosens as it warms and keeps loosening the longer the beater runs.

Chocolate in front of a table with the oven never turned on. The filling is blended tofu and melted chocolate with nothing else holding it, so the percentage printed on the bar decides the texture as much as the flavor. The tofu has to come to room temperature first, because melted chocolate meeting anything cold sets into grains on contact and a blender never runs warm enough to undo it.

Watch for: Have the crust unwrapped and waiting before you start blending. The filling begins to set the instant warm chocolate meets cool tofu, which leaves about a minute of it pourable.

The fast one. No creaming, no chilling and nothing waiting to come to room temperature: the wet ingredients go in one bowl, the dry in another, and they meet on the sheet. The only wait is a half-hour rest that lets the oats drink before they bake, which is the whole difference between chewy and sandy.

Watch for: If a maple-sweetened cookie has ever left a faint soapy aftertaste, that was unreacted baking soda. Soda needs an acid to work and maple gives it almost none, which is why this dough carries baking powder as well.

The flaky American crust people think of as the traditional one was built on shortening rather than butter, which makes this less a substitution than the older version of the pie. Most of the work happens before anything reaches the dish: an hour of the apples sitting in sugar, then the juice they give up cooked down and stirred back in, which is what stops the filling flooding the plate.

Watch for: Slice the apples at a quarter inch and no thicker. Half-inch slices will not cook through in the time the crust can survive, which is how you end up with crunchy fruit under a finished lid.

The dessert people assume cannot be made at home, where the part that goes wrong is not the frying everyone is afraid of. It is the syrup: cooked to the one-string stage most English-language recipes ask for, it is far too thick for the jamun to drink, and they come out of it the size they went in.

Watch for: Keep the fat low and slow. A jamun that browns in three minutes has set a crust while the middle is still raw dough, and nothing soaks through a sealed crust afterward.

For the people who want dessert in glasses rather than slices, and it genuinely improves for being made ahead. It also fixes the fault almost every vegan version has: built on canned coconut milk alone, the pudding ends up tasting of coconut rather than of banana, so this one cuts it with soy, which is the only common plant milk with the protein to give a cooked custard body.

Watch for: Push the custard right out to the edges of the dish. Any channel left down the side lets air at the banana slices, and they brown in the middle of the pudding where you cannot see it happening.

Pecan pie made rectangular, which solves the thing pecan pie is worst at: a pan cuts into far more pieces than a round dish and every one of them travels without a plate. The butter is the fiddly part, because it turns up twice in two different states, softened into the crust and melted then cooled into the filling.

Watch for: The pecans rise into a layer on top as it bakes, and that is not a fault. They are lighter than the syrup around them, so they float in the first few minutes and set as a crunchy lid over a smooth filling.

The hot-weather one, and it needs no heat at any stage. The set comes from cashews and coconut oil firming in the fridge, which also means it softens again on a warm table and wants bringing out just before it is eaten. It comes out pale yellow, which is correct: key lime juice is yellow, and a green key lime pie has had food coloring put in it.

Watch for: Measure the coconut oil melted, not scooped solid. The two volumes are not the same, and short-measuring it is the usual reason a filling never gets past a thick pourable cream.

Most people searching for this are shown sweet potato pie instead, and the two are not variations on one another. A pie is a smooth custard set in a shell. This is sliced sweet potato held in a syrup thick enough to coat it, and the whole appeal is that you can still see and taste the separate rounds.

Watch for: The buried crust comes out soft, and it is meant to. Pastry sitting in syrup cannot crisp and was never there to: it swells and takes up the spiced liquid, and that layer is the point of the dish rather than a sign it went wrong.

Two desserts stacked in one shell, for the occasion where the choice between chocolate and pecan has been refused rather than made. The order matters more than it looks: the brownie layer bakes alone for twenty minutes first, and that solo spell exists only to put a skin on it, so the pecan mixture has something to sit on instead of marbling down into it.

Watch for: The rim is baked three times, once blind and once under each layer, so it burns long before the middle is done. Lay a collar of foil over it when the pecan mixture goes on, not when you notice it darkening.

The coffee carries this dish and the dairy is the easy half to replace: soaked cashews blended with chilled coconut cream stand in for the mascarpone, with lemon juice doing the work the acid does in the real thing. The bitterness is half the recipe, so weak coffee or sweetened drinking chocolate is what leaves a tiramisu tasting like sweet cream pudding.

Watch for: Vegan ladyfingers need a longer soak than the split second classic recipes specify. That instruction was written for egg savoiardi, which are a dry meringue and drink coffee instantly, and a denser vegan biscuit dipped the same way stays chalky in the middle.

The one to make when berries are cheap. Its filling is cooked on the stovetop before it goes anywhere near the pastry, which is the step most blueberry pie recipes leave out: maple syrup is roughly a third water, and boiling that off in a saucepan where you can watch it is far easier than hoping the oven manages it under a lid.

Watch for: Cut at least four generous vents right through the top crust rather than pricking it with a fork. Fork holes seal shut again as the pastry sets, and the trapped steam then lifts the whole lid away from the fruit.

The one people come looking for on a deadline, and this version is built to be made the day before rather than the morning of. The filling sets on cornstarch instead of eggs, a tighter ratio than a dairy pumpkin pie and much less forgiving of a heavy hand with the liquid, so weigh it rather than scooping.

Watch for: Whisk the cornstarch through the sugar and spices before any liquid arrives. Tipped straight into cold liquid it clumps, and the outside of each clump gels on contact and seals dry powder inside where whisking cannot reach it.