Dulce de Leche

Want to make salted caramel ice cream without an ice cream maker and with only three ingredients? It doesn't get easier (or more delicious) than this.

Gently spiced pecans and a salty caramel topping give this morning treat a savory dimension.

When we say simple, we mean it. And simplicity is exactly what you want when the local strawberry season arrives, and you'd rather be outside than indoors at the stove—even though you want to celebrate berry season with an easy, spectacular dessert. Ta da! We've solved the problem. Borrowing and expanding on South American alfajores, those addictive buttery sandwich cookies filled with dulce de leche, we've made one big, flat cookie base (no hassling with tart pans), spread it with dulce de leche, and then topped it with a soft pillow of whipped cream for freshly sliced strawberries. It doesn't get better than this!

Dulce de leche is a popular sweet in Argentina and throughout the rest of South America, where it is also called manjar and leche quemada (“burnt milk”). Store-bought versions are increasingly available in North American supermarkets and specialty foods stores; use it in place of the homemade variety, if desired.

I can imagine Argentinians chuckling when they hear about the recent dulce de leche craze in the States. After all, they have been enjoying this sweet, milky caramel for nearly two hundred years. Relatively new here, and often available in the specialty foods section of the supermarket, dulce de leche can be used in all sorts of ways, but we like to drizzle it on top of what could be considered the moistest, most delicious cake on the planet (I double-dare you to find a better one). The combination has a perfect salty-sweet thing happening that is like a highly addictive sensory overload. I promise, it will have you coming back for more. If it doesn't, perhaps the crumbled brittle that decorates the top will.

If you choose to bake only one cookie from this collection, make it these bites. The crisp cookie base provides the perfect contrasting setup to the luscious caramel-flavored dulce de leche—caramelized milk—hidden under the creamiest cheesecake layer. The final snazzy drizzle of dulce de leche is not essential, we know, but it makes the bites downright irresistible.

Cajeta is a goat's-milk caramel popular in Mexico where it's made into candies or drizzled over ice cream and other desserts. The word cajeta is Spanish for "small box," named for the containers the caramel was traditionally packed in.
Making your own cajeta is worth the extra bit of work, but you can also buy it or substitute its South American cousin, dulce de leche.

Leftover dulce de leche is nothing if not versatile: You can spoon it over ice cream, drizzle it over fresh fruit, or serve it with cookies. But if you're still feeling industrious after making our Dulce de Leche Half Moons, use the rest in these truffles. We promise you won't be sorry. The combination of caramelized milk, bittersweet chocolate, and almond butter produces a deeply flavored, not–too–sweet confection. And there's no need to chill the mixture before rolling, as you would if making traditional truffles with chocolate and cream—this user–friendly "ganache" practically rolls itself. If you make the truffles with peanut butter, the nut flavor will be a bit more pronounced than in the almond–butter version.

This dressed-up rendition of a classic has a supremely satisfying filling.

This layered dessert gets its name, volador, from the way the edges of the pastry "fly up" as they bake. The combination of thin, crackly pastry with creamy dulce de leche is unbeatable in its simplicity. Don't worry if the torte doesn't slice neatly—it's meant to be an informal dessert, the kind that invites guests to swipe crumbs from the serving platter and dip them into stray puddles of dulce de leche. It's too good to let a single bite go to waste.

The creamy, butterscotchy goat's-milk caramel called cajeta makes this flan delicate and earthy all at once. Whipped cream balances the sweetness.

Known as pepitorias, these tasty caramel-filled wafer "tacos" embellished with toasted pumpkin seeds are a regular offering at Mexican markets and sweets shops, especially in the city of Puebla, which is famous for so many confections. The wafers are traditionally brightly colored, but we chose to stick with a more seasonal white-and-gold motif. Since tinted edible wafer paper is hard to come by in the United States, we used precut white Back-Oblaten, imported from Germany, and we explain how to color them. Painting them with food coloring or water softens them enough to fold around the caramel.

Fudgy cookies go Latin with an infusion of dulce de leche, a sweet milk caramel similar to cajeta and arequipe. These cool treats are happily portable on their crisp shortbread crusts.

This is not just the best dulce de leche ice cream we've ever had, it's one of the best ice creams we've ever had, period. The most blissful thing about it is that it's not too sweet; the delicate caramel essence isn't obscured by sugar. And since it's not a custard-based ice cream, it's easy to make.

This treat requires very little work and is a great make-ahead dessert.

In some Latin American countries, these cookies, called alfajores, are made with Pisco — brandy distilled from white Muscat grapes grown in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia — but regular brandy works fine.