35 of Our Favorite French Desserts
Make authentic crêpes, gougères, macarons, and more with recipes and techniques from legendary chefs.
French desserts have a high "ooh la la" factor. They're admired the world over and for good reason: They're stunning to look at and bring just the right combinations of flavor and texture. To successfully create these sweets at home, technique is important, as is the use of best-quality ingredients. Fear not: Our collection of French dessert recipes is meant to inspire and guide you through to the delicious end. From classic macarons to delicate crêpes and creamy custards, here are dozens of incredible French desserts to try.
Basic Crêpes
Crêpes are very thin pancakes that are light in the center, and have crispy, buttery edges. They are often rolled and filled with sweet or savory ingredients, and this go-to recipe works for both.
Vanilla–Brown Butter Sablé Cookies
Pastry Chef Natasha Pickowicz loves simple vanilla cookies like these. Vanilla, a notoriously difficult product to grow and source, really shines in this recipe, making the ingredient's quality especially important.
Alain Ducasse's Gougères
Diana Chistruga
Gougères, though they may look like tiny breads, are made from the classic French pastry pate à choux. On the sweet front, choux pastry is used to make éclairs and profiteroles, aka cream puffs; for chef Alain Ducasse's savory gougères, the dough is enriched with Gruyère and pepper.
Crêpes Suzette
Greg DuPree / Food Styling by Victoria Granof / Prop Styling by Christine Keely
While restaurants traditionally make the buttery orange-flavored sauce for this famous dessert tableside from start to finish, chef Jacques Pépin finds it easier to prepare largely in advance when entertaining. He flambés the liquor in front of his dinner guests and pours it over the platter of crêpes while still flaming.
Tarte Tatin
Morgan Hunt Glaze / Food Styling by Emily Nabors Hall / Prop Styling by Josh Hoggle
Tarte Tatin is a French dessert for which apples are caramelized in a skillet with butter and sugar, then topped with a round of pastry dough and baked. After baking the tarte, you invert the skillet to serve it. Tarte Tatin was named for Stéphanie and Caroline Tatin, who created it at the H?tel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, France, in the 1880s.
Floating Islands with Dark Chocolate Crème Anglaise and Toasted Pistachios
The rich, deep chocolate flavor contrasts with the incredibly light and airy texture of this classic French dessert. Use your favorite high-quality dark chocolate for the best results.
Hazelnut and Crème Fra?che Meringues with Lemon and Parmesan
Perfect for tea or a light dessert, these elegant double-decker meringues are filled with tangy, gently sweetened crème fra?che and drizzled with a generous spoonful of hazelnut praline. But the real head-turning touch comes from the garnishes — ethereal flakes of Parmesan and sunny flecks of lemon zest.
Fresh Raspberry Tart
To make sure the pastry stays crisp and flaky, arrange the raspberries on top no more than 30 minutes before serving. The jam not only sets the berries in place, but also adds flavor intensity and gives them a beautiful shine.
Raspberry Macarons
These are among the simplest classic French macarons, made with only sugar, almond flour, egg whites, red food coloring — and a filling of raspberry jam. The jam is the star of the show, so be sure to purchase the finest seedless raspberry jam you can find.
Apricot Pate de Fruit
In France, pates de fruits are sold in high-end patisseries or pastry shops. The French roll them in sanding sugar, which has large crystals that cling to the candy without melting. Table sugar also works, as long as the jellies are rolled in it just before serving.
Cream Puffs with Chocolate Sauce
At Christmas, pastry chef Elizabeth Katz likes to create a tower of fluffy, chocolate-covered cream puffs. The dessert harkens back to her time as a pastry chef in the French kitchen at New York City's Daniel, where a croquembouche (a pyramid of custard-filled profiteroles draped in caramel and wrapped in spun sugar) was de rigueur at holiday dinners.
Mango-Basil Vacherin
Yigit Pura perfected this crisp-creamy French dessert while working at restaurant Daniel in New York City. His updated version combines little lime meringue kisses with basil ice cream and sweet mango sorbet.
Cherry and Chocolate B?che de No?l
Every year during Christmas week, pastry chef Dominique Ansel serves guests complimentary mini b?ches de No?l. His version here is lighter than many, thanks to the beaten egg whites in the batter and the use of whipped cream in place of buttercream as frosting.
Spring Millefeuille
When you cut the millefeuille, celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli recommends using a serrated knife and a sawing motion to cut even (and fairly neat) portions. Or just put in the center of the table with some forks and let things happen as they may.
Bittersweet Chocolate Tart
This outrageously elegant tart is from Alain Ducasse's Manhattan restaurant, Benoit. Decadent bittersweet chocolate filling sits inside a chocolate-almond crust and is topped with a shiny cocoa and milk chocolate glaze. Serve it with lightly sweetened whipped cream.
Extra-Creamy Chocolate Mousse
What sets French Pastry chef Dominique Ansel's chocolate mousse apart from other versions of the dessert is that he folds in the chocolate just before serving.
Orange-Anise Croquembouche with White Chocolate
For this magnificent croquembouche, choux pastry puffs are filled with festive orange- and anise-infused cream, then secured into a tower with white chocolate. For extra magic, sprinkle the puffs with gold luster dust after they're stacked. Don't be put off by the nearly eight hours it takes to complete this showstopper — it's only one hour of active cooking time!
Plum Galette
This tart is a favorite dessert at Jacques Pépin's house. You can make it with any seasonal fruit, such as rhubarb, peaches, cherries, apricots, or apples. The dough is buttery, flaky, and very forgiving. It comes together in 10 seconds in a food processor.
Frozen Crème Caramel
To make her crème caramel more refreshing, chef Amanda Hallowell serves it partially frozen, like a semifreddo. These can be frozen for up to a week.
Raspberry Clafoutis
For this classic French dessert, vintner Alix de Montille swaps in raspberries for the traditional cherries. You can, of course, make it with sweet cherries if you'd like; apricots and plums would also work.
Chocolate-Frosted éclairs
éclairs are oblong profiteroles filled with some type of cream or custard, be it whipped cream, pastry cream, or chiboust cream, either plain or flavored. éclairs are usually finished with a glaze, ganache, or fondant icing. Famed pastry chef Joanne Chang of Boston's Flour Bakery + Café made this version.
Sugar-Crusted Chocolate Cookies
This is Jacques Torres' recipe for sablés, a classic French butter cookie with a sandy, crumbly texture (sablé means "sandy") — though this fabulously dense version is actually more like shortbread.
Chocolate-Dipped Florentine Shortbreads
Here, pastry chef and chocolatier Pierre Hermé combines the tenderness of shortbread with the elegance of florentines, the caramelized almond cookies studded with glittering candied fruit.
Burnt Honey-Orange Tuiles
The beauty of this cookie-brittle hybrid is that you can make it with any croissant — homemade or store-bought. To ensure a crispy tuile, let the croissant slices bake until they are a deep golden brown to give the sugar in the syrup time to caramelize and harden to the perfect texture.
Pain d'épices
This hearty, deeply spiced gingerbread loaf from French cook and blogger Mimi Thorisson has a wonderful honey-buckwheat flavor.
Madeleines
2017 F&W Best New Chef Angie Mar serves classic almond madeleines with Chanterelle Ice Cream.
Chocolate Tartlets with Candied Grapefruit Peel
Orange is the classic choice with chocolate, but candied grapefruit peel has a little bitterness that's also enjoyable. Chef Jacques Pépin prefers using a deep, strong dark chocolate with about 70 percent cocoa — the richer the better.
Lemon-Ricotta Soufflés
To make these individual soufflés sturdy, chef and vintner Maria Helm Sinskey uses choux pastry mixed with airy meringue and ricotta. While the inside is nicely custardy, the edges and sides are deliciously crisp. The soufflés, which have a lovely, not-too-sweet lemon flavor, can be served hot, warm, or cool, when they become like mini citrus cakes.
Triple-Layer Chocolate Macaroon Cake
French chef Fran?ois Payard layers chewy coconut cake with silky chocolate ganache. The beauty of the recipe is its simplicity: It has only six ingredients.
Jacques Pépin's Favorite Pound Cake
The French call pound cake quatre-quarts ("four-fourths") because the original was made with equal parts flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Jacques Pépin's mother, aunt, and cousin all have their versions. He likes to fold in candied citrus peels to make a French fruit cake; he also loves plain slices dipped in espresso.
Crème Br?lée
"This creamy, rich dessert is the perfect love letter," says chef Andrew Zimmern. "I made crème br?lée for dessert the first time I cooked for my wife when we had just started dating, and it worked out perfectly in every way."
Alsatian Rhubarb Tart
Jean-Georges Vongerichten bakes rhubarb in the raw pastry shell in a convection oven, rather than blind-baking the crust. To ensure a thoroughly cooked crust when using a conventional oven, we recommend baking the tart shell completely before adding the rhubarb. However you make this dessert, it's irresistibly tangy, creamy, and frothy.
Skillet Apple Charlotte
A classic apple charlotte has a crust of buttered bread slices filled with caramelized apples. In this quick version, apple wedges are sautéed with honey and maple syrup, topped with buttered toast, and turned out of the pan like a tarte Tatin.
Roasted White Chocolate and Coffee Truffles
Pastry chef Belinda Leong made many kinds of ganache during her time at the venerable Pierre Hermé patisserie in Paris. Here, she slow-roasts white chocolate, which adds an enticing caramel flavor to the super-creamy ganache filling in her truffles.
Pistachio Financiers
Jing Tio, owner of culinary boutique Le Sanctuaire, likes to end dinner parties with rare fermented Chinese p'uerh tea and pistachio financiers, the absurdly easy-to-make buttery French cakes. The batter is made with ground almonds; vibrant green pistachios decorate the cake tops.
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