11 Restaurant-Worthy Tips For Plating Desserts At Home

So, you're hosting your next dinner party or trying to impress your partner with a fancy meal. You've got it all figured out, right down to the sweet treats you'll be serving your guests — but what about plating them up? Sure, there are plenty of guides telling you exactly how to build the perfect charcuterie board or how to arrange your next party's grazing table — but do you know how to create an eye-catching dessert plate for each of your guests?

To help make the next time you host a little less stressful, we've baked up a complete guide to plating any kind of dessert you could imagine. From what plates to use to how you can top your desserts beautifully every time, we'll cover everything there is to know about plating your desserts so perfectly, they will deserve a Michelin star of their own.

Of course, we couldn't do it without a little help. We spoke to professional pastry chef and cookbook author Saura Kline to get an idea of all the tips you should know about plating desserts. Whether you're already a pro or just starting out on your baking journey, there's sure to be a few things you never knew about plating desserts before.

For the prettiest plate, you'll want to pre-slice your cakes and plate them before you serve them to your guests. However, Saura Kline says that pre-sliced cake can dry out pretty quickly — one reason why it's one of the desserts you should avoid ordering at a fancy restaurant. Which means that if you're slicing it up hours (or even a day or two) before your guests arrive, it will lose much of its moisture. This will take your cake from soft and perfectly cooked to bone-dry and crumbly.

Your best bet is to cut up the cake right before serving it if at all possible, which will usually mean disappearing to the kitchen for a couple of minutes to cut servings. If you opt cut it up in front of your guests and serve them individually at the same time, this leaves you with no ability to add on any of the extra touches that Kline recommends when plating desserts. For this reason, it's best to plate the cakes away from your guests' eyes. "Display the dessert beforehand, then slice in the kitchen before serving," says Kline — that way, your guests can admire the entirety of your elegant dessert before you serve it to them.

It's true that this method leaves you with less plating you can prepare ahead of time, but it'll be more than worth it to help keep your cake moist and tender. Plus, if you follow our hacks for achieving a simple and easy clean cut of cake, it'll hardly take you any extra time to cut up your cake in the end.

Adding small touches of vibrancy is one of the most fun ways Saura Kline likes to add color to her dessert dishes. "I like to make sure there is some color in the dish. Whether it be berries, a vibrant sauce, or a mint leaf."

When you think about plating your dessert with fruits, sauces, and leaves, don't choose your pairings based on color alone. You need to be considering the flavors of each pairing to make sure that none of your additions will create a bad bite for your guests — even if it's just a single berry on the side. Some of the most commonly used berries for plating desserts include strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Less common picks like gooseberries (as long as you're not in the U.S., that is) or seasonal fruits can also get the job done when it comes to a beautiful dessert plate. If your dessert already includes some kind of fruit in it, you can also use the leftover fruit for plating, matching the flavors present in your dessert.

Colorful sauces — like caramel sauce or a simple berry compote — work to add both flavor and color to the dish, and they also give you more room to play around. You could opt for a classic drizzle, a crosshatch, or a delicate smear of sauce across the whole plate. Opting for more than one fruit with two different sauces can give your dessert even more color and texture (as long as you don't go overboard with clashing flavors, of course).

"Cleanliness and uniformity are key," says Saura Kline — it's the one thing she takes extra care to emphasize when it comes to plating desserts. If you're cutting up a cake or pie and start plating up messy slices, your dessert will look sloppy and unthoughtful. Though it can be hard to achieve the perfect cut of pie or an even cut of cake, taking extra care to get a beautifully clean cut on all your desserts is key to plating like a Michelin-starred chef.

Use a large, sharp knife to cut your desserts — even something as big as a meat knife will work perfectly, as long as you've sharpened it recently. Cut with pattern in mind if there is one to follow — you want to avoid disturbing fruit, frosting, and other toppings as much as possible. A straight downward cut is always best — a single-layer cake should be quick and easy to cut, whereas desserts with many layers that are stuffed with frosting or fruit may take more time. Feeling nervous? Since you won't be cutting anything up in front of your guests, excuse yourself by letting them know that you're going to go and get dessert ready, and then take your time with the plating.

If you're not feeling quite as confident about your plating skills, never fear. Saura Kline has the simplest solution by far: using desserts that are served in ramekins or pots. "Anything that's served in a ramekin is probably the easiest," she adds in terms of plating. For the uninitiated, ramekins aren't just a serving dish — they're also used to bake your sweet treats. This means that you don't actually have to transfer your dessert out of the ramekin and onto a plate — you can just serve it as-is.

This makes ramekins or single-serve pots one of the easiest dishes to plate, since you can just pop it out of the oven, let it cool, and serve it up without ever having to pull out another dish. You can still add vibrancy and color with toppings, of course — but even if you serve your ramekin dessert as-is, your guests will still be delighted with how neat and orderly everything looks.

A few other ideas can include things like easy puddings or mousses that can be served in individual glasses or pots. Though you'll have to transfer these dishes, these are non-uniform desserts that can be heaped into a glass and still look pretty when serving. Kline lists a few more custard dessert ideas that can be baked and served in the same glass: "Créme brûlée, individual fruit crumbles, panna cotta, chocolate mousse, layered parfait ... "

In the end, it really doesn't matter whether you serve your desserts in bowls, cups, or plates. What matters is that every dish you serve your dessert in is the same. Saura Kline says that this helps with her number one rule for plating — cleanliness and uniformity — and we can't deny that it will make your desserts look so much more elegant.

Don't be afraid to get creative with the dinnerware you have on hand already. Cocktail glasses can be an elegant way to serve many parfaits or mousses at once, while smaller dessert plates are something you might already have extra of. It's better to leave the fine china in the cabinet if you don't have enough of it — plain and simple plates that all match will always look so much better than dishes that are all mixed up.

Using the same plates also gives you the benefit when it comes to adding extra touches of color. Some sauces may not stand out against plates of a certain color or material, while they might clash with others. Using the exact same plate gives you the opportunity to find the toppings that look best without having to worry about adjusting them for a different color or style of plate.

The focus of the plate should always be on the dessert itself. You poured your heart out into baking (or maybe just selecting at the grocery store) the perfect dessert — why cover it up with too many extraneous features? Just like Saura Kline says of restaurant desserts that are just for show, a dessert that comes with too many visuals usually won't taste as good. Plus, you'll just be cluttering up your plate and drawing attention away from what should be the star of the show. "I ... don't like to muddy up the plate with too many things; a main dessert, sauce, and some berries, for example, will look great," says Kline.

There's some grace for adding different kinds of berries and sauces onto one plate, as well as other toppings like powdered sugar, but you should start with the absolute basics of plating before you decide whether you actually need to add more to each dish. Think about why you're putting each item on the plate and what you want it to achieve. Does it add color? Texture? A fancy pattern? Is it overwhelming?

Keep in mind that this can also apply to the plates you're serving your dessert on, too! A bold and playful pattern can be really fun for some desserts, but might detract from the time you spent carefully cutting and plating for others. If you've already got a lot of other elements going on, you might want to opt for a more neutral color and material when it comes to plates.

Saura Kline knows that using a sauce can be a wonderful way to make your plate look more vivid and interesting. So, what's the best way to apply it? One handy hack is using a chef's squeeze bottle (or a condiment bottle) to help you drizzle your sauce. Especially for thicker sauces that you're having trouble drizzling evenly with a fork or spoon, a squeeze bottle can be an easy way to 'pipe' out designs with any kind of dessert sauce. You're looking for those squeeze bottles with the pointed tips, by the way, not just any old ketchup bottle. The OXO Good Grips Chef Squeeze Bottle is a good pick.

For something even simpler, you can always use a sauce on the base of your plate instead of drizzling it over the top of your dessert. This is a great way to help your dessert stand out against the plate even more, and it's a fun way to spruce up plain white plates, too. Put a small amount of sauce onto the edge of your plate, then take the back of a spoon and smear the sauce across the plate. This should give you a nice, simple smeared line that you can put your dessert directly onto or place next to — the easiest way to pretend you're a professional pastry chef.

What's the secret behind achieving the perfect cut every single time? Besides making sure you have a sharp knife that's appropriate for the dessert you're cutting, Saura Kline says that you should try running your knife under hot water and drying it off before each cut you make. Doing this will heat up your knife, and in doing so, "will ensure a clean cut and will give a better show when plating," says Kline.

Kline uses a large container of hot water to heat her knife when cutting and plating lots of desserts at once, but if you have fewer cuts to make, you can just run your knife under hot water at the sink. However, you should make sure your knife is dry before you go back to cutting your dessert to avoid accidentally getting water on your plate or your dessert.

You've just finished the most elegant, perfect cross-hatching design you've ever made, and then you realize — you still have eight more plates to finish. When you're working with complex designs, you might wind up with one dessert that looks absolutely perfect, and a whole lot of other plates that clearly fail to replicate the first. If it hasn't already been drilled into you by now, uniformity is the answer to the perfect dessert plate. So, it's important that you're actually able to replicate every single one of the designs you make.

It's better to have a simple design that is neat and replicated across each plate rather than a more complex one that doesn't look the same every time. Of course, designs like swirls and crosshatches won't come out completely identical, but they can be similar enough to make each plate look the same. If one plate has a beautiful drizzle and the other one has a huge clump of sauce in the middle, however, your desserts look uneven and unprofessional.

If you're struggling with your sauces, consider adding a very simple line, smear, or swirl of sauce to your plate before adding your dessert on top. This will ensure that you can wipe the plate clean and start over if you need to, and it will give you an easier pattern to replicate across every plate.

What can you do if you've decided to bake a dish that's just plain difficult to get out of the pan in one piece? You might worry that achieving the perfect plate involves swearing off traditionally messier dishes like cobblers, but that isn't necessarily the case. If you find that you're truly not able to get the dessert out of the pan in one piece (and you don't have any dishes that can make it look pretty), you might try opting for a single-serve dish instead.

Baking single-serve cobblers and crumbles, for example, will give you the same opportunity as a ramekin would: You can serve it in the dish in which it was baked. Basically, everyone will have a mini pie dish, baking dish, or pot instead of each being served from a communal baking dish. This will change your cooking times quite a bit (and might even require you to find a new recipe) but it could be worth it for the perfect plate. Plus, there's the added benefit of being able to serve these dishes warm and fresh out of the oven (when they taste the best) without having to worry about pre-cutting them.

Feel free to top your single-serve dessert as you would normally, with sauces and fruits — just place them directly on top of the dish rather than on the side this time. Be sure to allow your single-serve dishes to cool down significantly before serving them to your guests, or at least give them a heads-up that the dishes have just come out of the oven.

"Cakes and pies are most difficult [to plate], just to get a nice slice," says Saura Kline. That's why cutting carefully is the most important part of serving up a slice of cake to your guests. But if you feel like you're not up to the task, you can always go for a dessert that's easier to plate up. "I'd say tarts and individual pavlovas are probably the easiest," Kline adds (in addition to desserts served in ramekins).

These desserts will be less messy, easier to plate, and will hold up better than cakes and pies (the latter of which might start to leak juice or filling after you've plated it). Individual tarts and pavlovas give you the option of making single-serve items that are still easy to plate on their own rather than being served in the dish in which they were baked. Plus, these desserts are traditionally topped with fruits and sauces, which means you'll likely find that the recipe you use comes with recommended pairings.