10 Celebrity Chefs' Favorite Baked Goods

If you love baked goods, you're not alone. Research from Innova released in 2024 showed that 54% of American consumers buy sweet baked goods, with 40% enjoying baked goods more than once per week. These comfort foods are used to celebrate holidays, birthdays, and other milestones. For many, they are simply a way to enjoy a treat or to end a delicious meal.

Trying new goodies and recipes can also be a fun way to expand your baking repertoire or find that cool new hangout where you can chat with friends over coffee and cake. One way to seek out new items is to learn about celebrity chefs' favorite desserts and see if any of those strike your fancy. Here, you'll find a mix of purchased and homemade items, most of which are either easy to find or make yourself. We've got a collection of pies, cakes, cookies, and more here that chefs have said were among their favorites. And, if they love them, chances are you will as well. So, here are 10 celebrity chefs' favorite baked goods for you to consider for your next sweet treat.

Ina Garten's favorite cookie recipe is her own for salty oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies. Luckily, whipping up a batch is pretty quick, so she can make them whenever she wants. She's included salt to enhance the flavor of the chocolate and to give the cookie a boost. Plus, the fact that she uses chocolate chunks instead of chips (which contain stabilizers) means the chocolate will melt more and be softer when you bite into it.

There are other baked goods that Garten calls her favorites, including profiteroles, which she's said are the only dessert you should order when you're in Paris. She also has a favorite spring dessert, which is her raspberry rhubarb crostata. Of course, no talk of Garten's favorites would be complete without a store-bought option. That would be Tate's Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies, which Garten recommends for her mocha icebox cake recipe. The cookies are thin and crispy, and as they sit among the layers of mocha cream, they soften while remaining wonderfully chewy.

Another celebrity chef who likes cookies is Jamie Oliver, and his favorite is his devil's double choc malt cookies, which are as decadent as they sound. His recipe includes butter, dark chocolate, condensed milk, malted milk, malted chocolate candy, and white chocolate. These all lend their intense flavors and rich textures to these thick cookies that are then drizzled with more chocolate.

Oliver's favorite cookies contain a couple of ingredients that British fans will know, but U.S. fans may be a bit confused about. One is the malted chocolate candy. Oliver uses Maltesers, which are essentially the same as Whoppers. The two do have some differences, and some say that the Maltesers have better-tasting chocolate yet a blander malt filling than Whoppers. The other ingredient is Horlicks, which is a malted milk drink that was created by the same company that developed malted milk powder. People have posted online that in the U.S., you may be able to find it at Indian or Chinese markets, and if you have a British specialty shop nearby, you can check there, too, of course.

Sometimes you want a baked good that you can bring to someone as a gift, and Nigella Lawson's favorite baked good for gifting used to be a lemon drizzle cake. However, once she tried a version that combined the lemon with elderflower cordial, she was hooked. In fact, she liked the combination so much that she also created a similarly flavored pudding cake. "Cordial," by the way, refers to a couple of types of liquids. In the U.S., it often means a sweetened liqueur. But in the U.K., where Lawson is based, a cordial can also be a non-alcoholic drink that's very sweet and syrupy. Elderflower cordial is one of these drinks.

Lemon and elderflower are a delicious combination, and elder trees are a common sight in the U.K. The small trees produce abundant, flat-topped clusters of fragrant flowers, and these blossoms eventually give way to elderberries. (Important note: Never eat elderberries raw and don't use uncooked elderflowers, even as garnishes. They're only safe to use when cooked.) The flowers can be steeped in different liquids to provide flavor to those liquids, such as soaking them in boiled sugar syrup to produce elderflower cordial.

Martha Stewart is full of baking tips and knowledge and just happens to also be a lemon fan. So, when it comes to curating citrusy recipes, the culinary guru is a reliable source. And there's one recipe in particular that appears to have won one of her top spots, if not the top spot — upside-down lemon meringue pie. Now, apparently, she already loved lemon meringue pie, but when one of her staff members updated a recipe for lemon angel pie that belonged to their grandmother, the new version quickly soared above all others to become one of Stewart's favorites.

This new version, which was renamed upside-down lemon meringue pie, uses a crust made of baked meringue instead of the traditional pie crust. The crust remains flat and doesn't have high sides like a traditional pie crust, either. A filling of homemade lemon curd mixed with whipped cream sits on the baked meringue layer, and the whole thing is topped with more whipped cream and lemon zest. This is a light dessert that really lets the lemon flavor shine brilliantly.

Giada De Laurentiis openly adores croissants. She shared on her website "Giadzy" that she's especially fond of them when they're in the form of pain au chocolat, but it's the fragile, crispy outer layer on any type of croissant that she really loves. De Laurentiis says the best croissants she's had overall are at Poilâne in Paris, and that the ones at Jean Philippe Patisserie in Las Vegas were the best she's had in the U.S. Unfortunately, Jean Philippe Patisserie closed in 2018.

De Laurentiis also says that another of her all-time favorite desserts — which just happens to be baked — is torta caprese, an almond-flour cake from Capri that's made with chocolate. Most versions will use either dark or bittersweet, but De Laurentiis points out that some versions in Italy will use white chocolate along with lemon juice and zest, which results in a lighter texture and flavor. You can make torta caprese at home, and while the instructions may seem complicated at first, it's an impressive dessert that's really not that difficult to mix and bake.

Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman, loves to eat pumpkin scones. She also offers an interesting reason for using canned pumpkin purée instead of making it herself: the water content. If you make pumpkin purée on your own, you can try to squeeze out excess water before you purée it, but you can't really get an idea of exactly how much water is left. Without the equipment to get an exact reading, it's difficult to achieve the same moisture level every time you make the purée. But, the water content in commercially canned pumpkin is controlled because manufacturers have equipment that can exert much more mechanical pressure on the pumpkin to get more moisture out. This ensures that the level of moisture stays consistent between batches.

Note that Drummond's scones are the American type, which are sweeter and fattier than traditional British scones due to the larger amounts of sugar and butter in the recipes. Her scones also have a sweet glaze drizzled over the top. If you're looking for a new baking recipe to try in autumn, this would be a simple yet festive one.

Deb Perelman, who runs the Smitten Kitchen blog, has baked a lot over the years, to put it mildly. Those years have included many, many recipes for brownies. But there's only one recipe that she openly calls her favorite, and this is her conveniently named "My Favorite Brownies" recipe. She also calls this her "Forty Minute Naptime Brownies" recipe, after her son's short nap times and the fact that the brownies are ready for baking in just a few minutes. Unsweetened chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla extract, flour, and salt are all you need to produce chewy brownies that aren't overly sweet. 

Perelman notes that she doesn't like cakey brownies and that many fudgy brownies are too sweet. Fudgy brownies have more chocolate and butter, and cakey brownies have more flour. So, her recipe falls between fudgy and cakey. It uses a full stick of butter, which is more in line with some fudgy brownie recipes — but she uses fewer eggs for a balanced texture. She also uses slightly less sugar, and along with the unsweetened chocolate, that helps make the baked brownies just sweet enough, but not excessively so.

Gordon Ramsay's last meal menu may include sticky toffee pudding. However, there's another baked good that's high on his list of things to try if you get the opportunity — actually, two baked goods. Those are the two different versions of banana bread that he had at separate roadside stands in Hawaii when he was filming an episode for National Geographic. One of these was from Aunty Sandy's on Maui just off the Hana Highway on Ke'anae Road. The celebrity chef not only visited the roadside stand to try the bread, but he also helped bake a batch. The bread was so good that it made Ramsay curse and then apologize quickly because he had promised he wouldn't use foul language.

The other version is the one from Halfway to Hana, also located off the Hana Highway. Ramsay was so impressed by the banana bread there that he encouraged people to stop and buy as much as they could. He admitted to British Airways' "High Life Magazine" that he wasn't expecting the banana bread in Hawaii to be so good and noted that the fruit used on the islands were smaller, sweeter apple bananas.

Martin Yan has brought his wonderfully enthusiastic and very practical cooking demonstrations to TV screens for decades, and he is just as happy about sharing his favorite baked goods. He's got a few that you need to check out the next time you're near a Chinese bakery, and chief among those are the egg tarts, calling them a can't-miss item. He's also spotlighted pineapple buns (bolo bao), cocktail buns (gai mei bao), and pork floss buns (yuk sung bao). Pineapple buns are sweet buns that actually don't contain the fruit. They are similar to a Mexican concha or Japanese melon pan, and they got their name because they look like a pineapple rind after baking. Cocktail buns have a coconut filling inside sweet bread, and pork floss buns have a filling of shredded, dried pork.

Another favorite food of Yan's is durian, and in one of his TV show episodes about Chinese bakeries, he happily orders durian mooncakes after spotting a poster on a bakery wall. These mooncakes consist of a thin layer of dough that's wrapped around various fillings and then baked. They're usually eaten during the Mid-Autumn festival, but bakeries sometimes carry them at other times of the year.

If apple-based sweets are your thing, take a look at Emeril Lagasse's classic apple crisp. He himself has called this "one of [his] all-time favorites," on his YouTube tutorial and it's easy to see why. Tart and sweet apples (Granny Smith and Golden Delicious, which are the great apple varieties for baking) are combined with simple sugar, cinnamon, and cornstarch and then covered with a buttery, brown-sugar-filled crumble topping that turns beautifully golden in the oven.

Lagasse's love for baked goods is obvious. He's even said that some of his favorite childhood memories are going to a Portuguese bakery to buy sweet bread. The chef also noted that one of the baked items he has to have is Portuguese custard tartlets, or pasteis de nata. These were among the items that he learned to make when he started working as a baker, and you can make them at home with a muffin tray and store-bought puff pastry. Portuguese custard tartlets vary slightly from Chinese egg tarts as they have a flakier crust and a thicker, more eggy filling.