The Sweet Touch

This year, toss tradition aside and try one of these deliciously different holiday desserts, courtesy of America’s best pastry chefs

Written by Janet Fletcher • Styled by Roscoe Betsill
Photographed by Ellen Silverman • Produced By Susan Tyree Victoria & Molly Kincaid

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Photo: Ellen SilvermanThe holidays heighten the urge to splurge in just about everyone, but especially in people who cook for a living. For pastry chefs, the season inspires the showiest of finales, creations that are typically beyond the talents of most home cooks. But not the ones we've showcased here: These are six dazzling but doable desserts. For fresh holiday ideas, Met Home turned to some of the nation's biggest names in pastry—an arena dominated by women these days—and asked them to update tradition.

Chef Dunia Borga's cuatro leches cake nods to the classic pastel de tres leches ("cake of three milks"), a dessert she learned from her husband, who is part Mexican. "But I have to give it a little of my Colombian touch," says Borga, co-owner of La Duni Latin Café in Dallas. That's where the fourth "milk" comes in, a luscious Latin caramel sauce based on dulce de leche that she pairs with her meringue-frosted cake.

In San Francisco, Elisabeth Prueitt glamorizes the gingerbread cookie, adding dark cocoa for spice and color and giving the surface a frosted sheen. The cookies have a cult following at Tartine, her wildly popular neighborhood bakery, where they are packed in cellophane bags to give as gifts.

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