Easy Italian Dessert Recipes

If you're looking to entertain with Italian desserts, don't forget to use easy italian dessert recipes!

Italian main dishes tend towards tangy robustness with a lot of basil and spices; by contrast many Italian dessert recipes focus on texture and smoothness.

A good Italian dessert should dance on the palate after a full Italian meal, with bold, simple flavors and not too much of the cloying sweetness.

Here are two of our favorite easy italian dessert recipes:

Frittele di Mele (Apple lemon fry bread)

Ingredients:

About 3 lbs of apples
4 large eggs
2 cups (and 2.5 tbsp) flour
4 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp rum
4 Tbsp milk
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
grated zest from two lemons (grate it fresh if possible)
confectioners sugar

Oil for frying. While not exactly Italian, peanut or sesame seed oil both add a nice zip to this recipe when used as a cooking medium.

Peel and shred the apples, setting them aside – think of this as making "apple hash" and you won't be too far off. Set them aside (cover them with cheese cloth). Then beat the eggs in a separate mixing bowl, adding in the sugar and flour. Mix until they're well combined, then add in the milk, rum, cinnamon and grated lemon zest.

Once they're all blended, add in the shredded apples, and mix thoroughly. Cover with cheese cloth again, and heat the oil in a small nonstick pan. Don't scorch the oil! If it smokes, turn it down.

Once the oil is hot enough, scoop up the apple-dough and form it into a ball, rolling it into the hot oil. Turn them carefully so they're cooked all around (they'll expand a bit). Pull them out and place them on a dish with a paper towel to soak off the excess oil, and sprinkle them with powdered sugar.

For variations, you can remove the cinnamon, or replace it with ground cloves in the mix. Anything that smells good with apples will work will in this recipe.

Tiramisu

Ingredients:
6 pasteurized eggs
36 Savoiardi (lady fingers)
1 lb of mascarpone cheese
2 1/2 cups of espresso
1/2 cup of dry Marsala wine
13 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp un-sweetened cocoa

Separate the egg yolks from the whites, and beat them with the sugar until they're light and fluffy; this is a job for a mixer. Don't let anyone tell you that mixers are for wussies; beating this with your arm and a whisk will take all the joy out of this.

Once they're well blended, add the mascarpone cheese, then whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form; fold them gently into the cheese/egg mixture with a spoon. You'll need to fold it gently; lift the mascarpone structure from bottom to top.

Next, add in the cocoa to 1/3 of the mixture and mix well. Spread 1/2 of what's left (1/3 total) onto a cake pan – this should about cover a 9x12 pan.

Quickly dunk the ladyfingers into the espresso coffee and place them on top of the mascarpone layer in the pan. Cover this layer with the chocolate cream layer, then dunk the remaining ladyfingers into the wine, and put them on top – then cover with the rest of the mascarpone mixture, and then sprinkle cocoa powder on the top, and refrigerate for 24 hours.

You can do lots of variations on this easy italian dessert recipe – the ratio of cocoa in the mixture is one major one; some mix a lot of cinnamon in with the chocolate.

If you're making this for children, you may want to avoid using the wine, though the amount of alcohol is small enough that there's no real risk in serving it to children.