16 Celebrity Chefs And Their Favorite Desserts

Dessert — the word alone conjures up happy memories for most. More than likely, you have a favorite dessert. That one go-to sweet treat that magically makes all of your problems disappear — at least in the moment you're savoring each bite. Maybe it's a chocolate souffle, blueberry pie, or just a bowl of really good ice cream. Whatever your sweet tooth desires, there are countless desserts to sink your teeth into. But have you ever wondered what your favorite chef's dessert might be? We have, and we decided to find out.

The answers were as varied as the chefs themselves. Whether it was a dessert focused on fruit or one filled with chocolate, the list is quite delicious. The one common denominator among all the chefs is the love of a good dessert. But not every chef creates their own dessert, and those who do won't necessarily choose their own concoction as their favorite. We searched through our archives and past interviews and recently reached out to some chefs to discover what decadent dessert makes their mouths water and taste buds light up.

What's better than a coconut cake? A 12-layer coconut cake. Celebrity chef and restauranteur Bobby Flay's all-time favorite dessert comes from The Peninsula Grill at the Planters Inn in Charleston, South Carolina. Flay is so enamored with this creamy, coconutty creation that he showcased a sweet challenge with the original cake maker, chef Robert Carter, on his show, "Throwdown with Bobby Flay." But what's so special about this dessert? Well, for starters, the cake weighs 12 pounds. That's a lot of cake.

Despite its weight, the 12-layer coconut cake is light and fluffy. It contains nearly a dozen cups of shredded coconut, most of which is for the creamy filling. Accompanying this intense amount of coconut flavor is a buttery cream cheese frosting. The cake is served with a sweet coconut crème anglaise — a custard sauce — and sliced strawberries for garnishing. This cake is so extravagant it requires two days and quite a few steps to make.

Sticky toffee pudding is usually thought of as a British dessert. But the origins of this traditional dessert may be more dramatic than you realize. Rumors indicate the sticky dessert may actually originate from Canada. While it's unclear where the dessert was invented, it became incredibly popular in the Cumbria region of Great Britain when introduced on a hotel menu.

Regardless of how sticky toffee pudding came about, it's one of Gordon Ramsay's favorite desserts. Television personality and Michelin-starred chef Ramsay said on Mythical Kitchen's YouTube channel that it would be part of his last meal and he "would like to put [the] dessert inside [his] coffin." Ramsay shared that his mom would always find time to make the delicious treat for special birthdays despite working three jobs.

Sticky toffee pudding is made primarily from dried dates that have been soaked in boiling water and then pureed. Combine that with a basic cake batter, and the end result is a moist, spongy cake that's dark and sweet. Traditionally, sticky pudding is topped with a rich toffee sauce.

Torta caprese — a flourless cake native to the island of Capri in Italy — is one of Giada De Laurentiis' "favorite desserts ever," according to her website. However, she writes how she "might enjoy this lemon torta caprese version even more!" A twist on the original chocolate dessert, this flourless cake can also be made with white chocolate or lemon, and you'll sometimes find that in Italy. Typically created from ground almonds (and sometimes hazelnuts), the lemon-flavored torta caprese is a lighter dessert than the chocolate version.

Since the cake is flourless, it's rather dense in texture and remains quite moist. Using ground almonds (or almond flour for a slightly less "flourless" version), eggs, sugar, white chocolate, lemon, and butter, this lemon torta caprese gets its lightness from whipped egg whites. While it's normally enjoyed cooled right out of the oven, De Laurentiis mentions on her blog that it's also delicious when it's had a chance to chill in the fridge.

Combining two of his favorite desserts — apple crisp and bread pudding — French chef and food personality Jean-Pierre Bréhier created what is now his ultimate favorite dessert — brioche bread and apple crisp pudding. To top it off, he adds a dollop of vanilla ice cream with a drizzle of white chocolate caramel sauce as a finish. "I combine the comforting flavors of bread pudding and the delightful crunch of apple crisp," Bréhier explains on his website. The dessert includes sauteed apple slices, rich custard, and a crumble topping.

While brioche is used for his choice of bread, you can opt for croissants, raisin bread, or even cinnamon rolls to make a bread pudding. Each type of bread will change the end result, of course, so be mindful of which bread you choose and adjust your other ingredients accordingly. Traditional bread pudding features raisins, but Bréhier's favorite bread pudding also includes apricots, cranberries, and cherries. A classic crumble topping usually gets its crunch from a mix of oats and nuts, but there's a lot of room for variations when making apple crisp. Bréhier's chosen topping includes pecans and two different types of cereal.

The apple tarte tatin, named after the Tatin sisters who popularized the upside-down dessert over a century ago, is one of award-winning chef Andrew Zimmern's favorite desserts. Its recipe is simple, with only a handful of ingredients needed. Though it mostly consists of apples, it's quite the showstopper. Zimmern said, "It's easy and showcases apples better than any dessert I know of." 

Tarte tatin may only require a few ingredients, but the few ingredients accompanying the apples highlight the depth and taste of the fruit. Caramelizing the apples in a skillet with butter and sugar turns the fruit sweeter, rich, and dense. The caramelized apples are topped with pastry dough and then baked in the oven. Once tarte tatin is done, it's flipped upside down for serving, revealing a deep golden, gooey display of candied apples. To help you nail this dessert, look for these mistakes to avoid when making apple tarte tatin.

Chocolatey, rich, light, and airy — chocolate soufflé is one of Austrian restauranteur Wolfgang Puck's favorite desserts. A soufflé is a French dish that's primarily made from baked eggs. But what makes a soufflé special is the manner in which the eggs are treated. In order to reach soufflé status, egg whites are whipped until they become fluffy. Then they become puffy after baking, giving you a delicate, soft, and decadent base. Soufflés can feature a range of ingredients in order to create multiple variations, from cheese to vegetables to chocolate.

Puck crafts his soufflé with bittersweet chocolate that is melted and mixed with egg yolks. After the egg whites are whipped into stiff peaks, they're folded into the chocolate mixture. The dessert is cooked until the outside of the individual soufflés are set so the middle remains soft and luxurious. You end up with a bite of spongy chocolate cake that has a mousse-like chocolate interior.

Sometimes the best dessert is pretty simple. Chef and food personality David Chang's favorite dessert is a glazed doughnut with a side of ice cream. On the cooking show, "Dinner Time Live With David Chang," he expressed one of the best things he's ever eaten is a pan-fried, store-bought, glazed doughnut (Krispy Kreme, to be exact) sandwiched in between ice cream, specifically a cereal milk ice cream from chef Christina Tosi.

The hot doughnut and gooey glaze mix with the bottom layer of cold ice cream, giving you a creamy pool of flavor to sop up with each bite of doughnut. The additional scoop of ice cream on top only enhances the contrast of warm, airy dough and cool, smooth cream. Chang pan-fries his doughnuts whole, but alternatively, you can slice doughnuts down the middle, frying the inside dough, which creates a crispy, crunchy, mouth-watering bite. Elevate this simple dessert by making your own glazed doughnut and homemade ice cream.

Banoffee pie, named after two of its main ingredients, is a British dessert that features bananas, whipped cream, and toffee, and it's television host and restaurateur Robert Irvine's favorite dessert. "It's sweet but not cloyingly so: The bananas and whipped cream are balanced nicely by the crumbled biscuit crust and toffee," Irvine tells us. Though the ingredients are simple, they're combined in a way that Irvine says acts like a perfect team where each part elevates the end result, creating a greater and more cohesive dish. But his love of the dessert goes beyond his palate's satisfaction. Banoffee pie reminds him of home.

It may surprise people that Irvine even has a favorite dessert. " ... I'm a big dessert guy. A lot of people don't think I would be because of the reputation I have as a gym rat, but I believe we can enjoy all things in moderation," he said.

Banoffee pie begins with a buttery biscuit base, which is the only part of the pie that's baked. Once the crust is done, it's topped with toffee, slices of fresh banana, and finished with whipped cream.

New York City chef and restaurateur Joe Isidori's favorite dessert is banana cream pie, but not just any banana cream pie — Petee's Pie Company's banana cream pie. "The intense banana flavor is perfectly combined with the ultra-rich creamy texture of the pie," Isidori tells us. Petee's Pie Company uses the freshest ingredients, most of which are sourced from local farms in New York. Pies are baked fresh twice a day. The banana cream pie features vanilla pudding, banana slices, and whipped cream in a crust made with grass-fed butter and organic New York state flour.

But if you want to try your hand at making your own banana cream pie, our recipe is a slightly different variation featuring a few more ingredients and requires a from-scratch buttery crust. Instead of a vanilla pudding base, though, this version uses a custard that includes cinnamon and vanilla and is layered with slices of banana. The pie is finished with a layer of whipped cream.

Tres leches, when translated, means three milks. It's a dessert that's typically created when sponge cake is soaked in — you guessed it — three different types of milk: evaporated, condensed, and whole. The sponge cake is light and airy and made with basic ingredients. It's often topped with whipped cream. Chef Adrianne Calvo's favorite dessert is a variation of this traditional tres leches. But instead of sponge cake, she enjoys it with bread pudding.

Instead of soaking sponge cake, Calvo uses pieces of croissants to create her bread pudding. She also adds brown butter and white chocolate to craft the final dessert. And if that isn't enough yum for you, the croissant bread pudding is topped with vanilla ice cream and a salted caramel sauce. "There's just something uber irresistible to me about the warm butter goodness and cold, creamy contrast of the ice cream, and the pop of flavor from the salty caramel," she tells us.

Celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli's favorite dessert is the sinfully delicious devil's food cake, though chocolate clearly comes from the heavens. Guarnaschelli's preferred chocolate treat devil's food cake is a light spongy cake with a chocolate flare. But when it comes to the difference between devil's food cake and your standard chocolate cake, the devil is in the details ... the chocolatey details.

Devil's food cake is much richer than regular chocolate cake. The taste more resembles dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate. But even though it has a deeper chocolate taste, it's lighter in texture due to the recipe calling for more baking soda — the leavening agent that gives the cake fluff. Guarnaschelli enjoys a perfectly made devil's food cake with a generous helping of unsweetened whipped cream on the side.

A classic pound cake is one of celebrity chef Ina Garten's favorite desserts. Can you blame her? Pound cake is one of the most versatile desserts for any dining experience. It can be dressed up or down, enjoyed with coffee, or served with fruit, and there are endless variations to create. Garten has perfected one of her favorite variations: vanilla pound cake. Using her original cake recipe, which requires ingredients most kitchens have, she adds Cognac and lemon zest to enhance the vanilla bean and extract already present in the recipe.

Although there are many ways to create this cake today, the old-fashioned pound cake was named as such because the original recipe called for a pound of each ingredient: flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. The cake was large and pretty dense, meant to feed a lot of people. Modern-day iterations result in light, moist, and smaller cakes.

For a French chef who is known as Mr. Chocolate, you might expect his favorite dessert to be, well, centered around chocolate. But Jacques Torres' favorite dessert is baked Alaska. "I love the contrast of texture, temperature, and flavor in my dessert," he tells us. "The crunchy shell of the meringue with the soft, creamy ice cream center, and moist sponge cake; the warm torched meringue and the cold ice cream; with flavors that are tart and sweet ..." The original version calls for plain and simple ingredients like a white sponge cake, vanilla ice cream, and traditional meringue. But with such a blank canvas, you can switch up the flavors to create your own personal favorite fancy ice cream cake like vanilla, raspberry, or chocolate.

For a dessert that looks stunning and complicated to make, it's not as hard as it looks. Making a baked Alaska requires more forethought than execution. Deciding on your flavors is the fun part. The base of your baked Alaska is a sponge cake, and you can enjoy vanilla, chocolate, coconut, or even banana. On top of the cake is your ice cream. Again, you can choose any flavor you want that matches the flavor of your cake. The final pièce de résistance is the dome-shaped meringue topping. Not only does the meringue take on a golden crispy exterior, but it shields the ice cream from melting.

When we think of dessert, we're often transported back to childhood. From some, it's warm cookies out of the oven. For others, it's a freshly baked pie cooling on the counter. Chef and entrepreneur Douglas Keane's favorite dessert is blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream (and one of ours as well). "My mom makes the best pie," he tells us, "with Michigan blueberries." Included in this blueberry pie is cinnamon and lemon zest — two ingredients that highlight and enhance the taste of blueberry.

But the from-scratch blueberry filling is only a part of this pie equation. Keane says his mom makes "the best pie crust ever," calling it "pie dough on steroids." She uses half butter and half cream cheese and shapes the crust with a fork — a method that gives results and what Keane also uses when crafting pie dough. "By using the fork, she was able to emulsify the fat so that it was remarkably flaky, but [it still] browned and got crispy," he explains.

Known as The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond's all-time favorite dessert is tres leches cake. She described tres leches in her cookbook as a heavenly sponge cake soaked in three different kinds of milk, and it is both sweet and creamy. She first discovered this dessert in 2020 when making it for a friend who hadn't had it in quite a while. Though Drummond had not heard of the dessert previously, she set out to make it for her friend's birthday. We should all have friends like that.

There are variations of tres leches, but Drummond makes this light and airy, "to die for" cake — as she described it on The Pioneer Woman — with evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and heavy cream. She uses a simple vanilla sponge cake (once it's cooled) to soak up the three milks, which are easily absorbed into the spongy cake without making it soggy. After that, she tops the cake with a layer of whipped cream.

Julia Child's favorite dessert may take some patience to make, but creating Child's beloved floating island of sweet and creamy deliciousness is time well spent. But what is floating island exactly? This French dessert is a classic and consists of baked meringue "floating" in a custard base. The meringue can be time-consuming to make since you're whipping egg whites and sugar together in an effort to create a light and fluffy result. The meringue is baked until it turns shiny, but it must cool before adding it to your custard sauce.

Meringue can be enjoyed without the custard, but you'd be missing out on an opportunity to partake in a French delight: crème anglaise. To make crème anglaise, you need cream, sugar, and egg yolks. Making this base custard sauce also takes some patience, but the results are also worth your effort. To serve floating island, place the baked (but cooled) meringue in a small bowl of crème anglaise. Top with nuts or berries, or drizzle with chocolate or caramel sauce, if desired.