Dessert Recipes with Wild Edible Plants

Dessert Recipes

A selection of recipes for snacks and desserts featuring wild edible plants. You’ll find baked goods, ice creams, cookies and cakes, all using wild nuts and berries.

A plate of pine nut cookies. — Photo by Holly A. Heyser

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• Recipes: Ice Creams & Ices | Booze & Brewing | Baked Goods | Wild Syrups

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Ice Creams and Ices

I love making ice cream with wild ingredients, and, where something creamy isn’t appropriate, ices and sorbets.

Some of my favorites are wild mint leaf ice cream, paw paw ice cream, and black walnut ice cream, which is also great with butternuts or hickory nuts.

I also make a damn good gooseberry and blackberry sorbet.

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Booze and Brewing

Infused liqueurs, wild beers and wines, even wild champagnes are big favorites. It’s an important way to preserve the aromas and flavors of many wild foods.

Some of my most popular recipes are elderberry wine, elderflower liqueur – and elderflower champagne – as well as spruce tip beer, and my all time favorite wild brew, a red ale fermented on wild juniper yeast I call Junipine.

Fir tip ale recipe — Photo by Holly A. Heyser

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Baked Goods

I am not a natural baker, but I do have a few recipes for baked goods I am happy with, mostly cookies and simple cakes. Especially cookies.

The pretty picture at the top of this page is of my pine nut cookies, and some of my other popular baked goods include persimmon bread, olive oil rosemary cake, butternut squash bread, fig bread, huckleberry muffins, butternut cookies and anise cookies made with wild fennel seeds.

And come holiday time, venison mincemeat pies are well worth the effort – sweet, tart, savory, fatty, and crunchy, they check all the boxes.

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Wild Syrups

One of the most versatile things you can do with a wild fruit or aromatic herb is to make a simple syrup with it. This brings out the flavor of the fruit, and is shelf stable.

My most popular wild syrup is prickly pear syrup, but I also make a mean spruce tip syrup, that also works with pine or fir, a simple blackberry syrup, and an intriguing fig syrup that is great on ice cream or pancakes.