Ideas For Delicious Desserts To Make With 5 Common Pantry Staples

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The “pantry” at Goods Bakery in Brussels - the perfect place to stock up on unusual and delicious pantry ingredients!

We all know the feeling of standing in front of our wardrobes full of clothes and yet feeling like we have nothing to wear. Sometimes, staring at your pantry can conjure up similar feelings. And sure, some of those feelings might be linked to our pantries being stuffed so full of things it is difficult to make head and tail of its current contents. But I think part of the reason might also be that we fail to fully appreciate ingredients’ full potential to create delicious dishes - savoury and sweet.

For today’s post, I thought I would take you through 5 ingredients that I’m confident most of us have in our pantries most of the time and show you just how versatile they are when it comes to creating desserts and baked goods - of course with plenty of links to recipes to get you started. 

What are your favourite pantry staples or pantry ingredients? Let me know in the comments below.

Breadcrumbs

Let’s start with one of the cheapest and most humble pantry ingredients - breadcrumbs. I always have some in my pantry - for making meatballs, for a crunchy topping for Mac and Cheese, or to turn it into Pangritata - aka poor man’s parmesan. For this you simply fry some breadcrumbs in olive oil, possibly with some garlic and fresh or dried herbs, or even some mashed anchovy fillets, until golden brown and crunchy. You can then use this to top your pasta instead of parmesan (I particularly like it with Pasta con le Sarde). And while it may be called poor man’s parmesan it is so delicious it really shouldn’t be considered the lesser alternative to parmesan! But I digress. 

As I discovered during the pandemic when flour was in short supply, if you have some breadcrumbs in your pantry you already have one brilliant ingredient for your next dessert or cake. For example:

• There are cake recipes entirely made with breadcrumbs instead of flour - like this Breadcrumb Plum Cake from Tamal Ray;

• You could use breadcrumbs instead of cookie crumbs to make a base for cheesecake (you might just have to add or increase the amount of sugar in the recipe to your liking) - I imagine this would be particularly delicious as a base for a slightly savoury-leaning cheesecake, like one made with goat’s cheese or a mix of cream cheese and feta for example;

• There are also recipes where you could use breadcrumbs instead of ground nuts and seeds - e.g. for a French Dacquoise, a layer cake made up of several layers of meringue studded with ground nuts. It is delicious made with toasted breadcrumbs instead. 

• As delicious as breadcrumbs fried in olive oil are to top pasta, you could also toast your breadcrumbs in some butter and sugar (maybe even add a sprinkle of cinnamon, ground cardamom or your favourite spice mix) and use that as a topping for things like Panna Cotta, ice cream, or sweet dumplings like these Labneh Dumplings with Toasted Cardamom Crumbs and Sumac Cherries inspired by Austrian Topfenknödel: 

• You could also use breadcrumbs to create an absorbent layer below juicy fruits for pies and similar cakes. 

Chamomile Tea

I fully appreciate that many of us probably have somewhat negative associations with chamomile tea. After all unpleasantly lukewarm chamomile tea is what many of our parents will have forced us to drink when ill as a child. It’s also still served in hospitals a lot. But bear with me, because chamomile is one of the most underrated pantry staples and truly phenomenal in desserts. And I bet you have a box of chamomile tea bags at the back of one of your cupboards! 

It is hard to accurately describe the delicate flavour of chamomile - it is somehow both fresh and floral but also a bit hay-like. (Just don’t let your chamomile steep for too long because it will become unpleasantly bitter). 

While I often think chamomile is the perfect flavour to play with in spring and early summer because it pairs so well with strawberries it actually works year round. It is beautiful paired with apricots and is also a great partner in crime for anything made with apples or pears (not surprising maybe given that the word chamomile (via French and Latin) derives from the Greek word for “earth apple”). Here are some ideas:

• Use chamomile tea to poach different fruits - see my recipe for chamomile tea poached pears in the Guardian from a few years ago. I think apricots would work well for this too; 

• You could also use chamomile tea directly in cake batters - like in these chamomile Financiers I shared on Substack a few months ago;

• You could also use chamomile tea to infuse milk or cream to create different kinds of custards and fillings for cakes, pies, tarts etc. like in Nicola Lamb’s Mimosa tarts with honey chamomile cream (Nicola also shared a delicious sounding recipe for Chamomile Apricot Jam which is worth having a look at);

• I also came across this chamomile tea simple syrup recipe in the New York Times which I would imagine would be delicious poured over a simple Panna Cotta or Blanc Manger or as a syrup to sweeten a strawberry or stone fruit salad, or maybe even drizzled over a slice of French Toast and ricotta. And you could of course also use it to moisten cake layers for example.

Coconut Milk

If, like me, you stockpile cans of coconut milk because you never know when the next craving for a creamy Thai coconut curry will strike then you already have a true workhorse of an ingredient in your pantry. Because coconut milk is incredibly versatile when it comes to making desserts and cakes.

You are probably already aware of Thai sticky coconut rice with mango. So it goes without saying that you could also use coconut milk in addition to or instead of milk and cream when making any kind of rice pudding. But we probably have the vegan folks to thank for discovering and appreciating coconut milk’s full potential when it comes to desserts: 

• Placed in the fridge upside down, the fat and water in the coconut milk will separate and you can then whip the fatty part to make coconut whipped cream - which I think would be delicious with any kind of cake or dessert but particularly with those desserts made with ingredients that have a natural affinity with coconut. Think pineapple upside down cake or key lime pie for example. Or maybe even use it to finish your next Banoffee Pie for a slight twist;

• And speaking of Banoffee Pie, you could also use your can of coconut milk to make coconut dulce de leche to fill your next Banoffee Pie. In fact, you could try substituting coconut milk for cream in any sort of caramel / butterscotch sauce - see here for a recipe for salted coconut butterscotch sauce from fellow Substack Vanilla Black;

• I also think coconut milk would be delicious for a Ceviche style fruit salad - think thinly shaved fruits like pineapple, dragon fruit, mango and different kinds of melon topped with a mix of coconut milk and lime juice, maybe some fresh or stem ginger, some passion fruit and some chopped salted peanuts for crunch;

• You can also use coconut milk to replace one of the three milks in Tres Leches cake - I did that for a dinner party with friends a while back, topping the individual Tres Leches cakes with some fresh passion fruit and it was so delicious. (And here is another trick - while Tres Leches cake is typically made with a fresh sponge cake, in a pinch you can simply use ladyfingers, another pantry staple!);

• There is clearly a theme here, namely that you can try using coconut milk whenever a recipe calls for milk or cream - so also bear this in mind the next time you are making not just rice pudding, but also sweet semolina pudding, porridge, creme anglaise, crème caramel, crème brulée etc.

And just as I was taking a break from proofing this post, I came across this genius tropical fruit salad recipe in the Guardian from Ottolenghi - he also suggests placing the can of coconut milk in the fridge overnight but then uses the coconut water to flavour the fruit salad itself and then serves the whipped coconut cream with the fruit salad. How good does that sound?! I think the only thing that would bring this fruit salad over the top would be to scatter some chopped salted peanuts on the coconut whipped cream right before serving. 

Nut butter 

I grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwich long before this was a thing in Germany and you still had to go to either the “exotic” or American food aisle in bigger supermarkets to find a jar of peanut butter (I have to thank my mum and her childhood spent partly on an American military base to thank for this). While I have branched out and happily eat other nut butters these days - roasted almond butter and walnut butter being firm favourites - I always have at least one jar of nut butter at home. Besides using it for my breakfast, it’s also incredibly versatile in cooking and can also act as a decent stand-in when recipes call for Tahini or Chinese sesame paste and I am out of either of those two. 

Beyond savoury cooking, nut butters are also useful staples to have on hand when it comes to making desserts: 

• There was a bit of a craze a while back around Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies - and rightly so, replacing part of the butter in a cookie recipe with Tahini yields deliciously nutty cookies with an almost sandy texture. You can achieve the same effect using other nut butters. I think roasted and slightly salted peanut butter works particularly well;

• You could also use nut butters to flavour brioche and similar enriched doughs - see this recipe for Tahini or Peanut Butter Brioche. Forexample, imagine individual little peanut butter brioche pastries with some berries in the middle and topped with a peanut butter crumble (yes, you can also use nut butters instead of all or part of the butter when making a crumble topping)!

• You can of course also use nut butters to flavour things like whipped cream, custard (including for ice cream - I mean, how about a Tahini Stracciatella ice cream?!), buttercream, pastry cream etc.;

• In short, you can use nut butters in a number of recipes that typically call for nuts - e.g. in a pinch you could even try making a frangipane (for Bostock or similar) using nut butter instead of ground nuts!

• Lastly, as someone who is lactose intolerant, I also discovered that if you are out of milk you can simply add some nut butter and water to a blender and within a few minutes you have homemade nut milk! (When I make my own nut milk I typically use 250g of nuts for 1L of milk, so just scale down from those quantities to however much milk you need). And in a similar vein if you already have some rice milk at home you could probably try blending that with some almond butter and cinnamon for a sort of last minute Horchata-ish (delicious with an iced coffee by the way!). If so, I would use half the amount of almond butter you would otherwise use. 

Soy Sauce 

As much as I am a huge fan of things like salted caramel or sea salt topped brownies and cookies (and have played quite a bit with Miso to achieve a similar effect), it wasn’t until Sarah from Nova Bakehouse sent me some of her soy sauce caramels to try in the very early stages of her journey that I realised I had completely overlooked soy sauce, such a common pantry ingredient, as an ingredient to add saltiness, umami and complexity to desserts. If you haven’t already make sure to subscribe to Sarah’s Bake Sense Substack! Here are some ideas;

• Be like Nicola Lamb in Sift and pour some soy sauce over milky panna cotta (I reckon it would be equally delicious drizzled over vanilla ice cream and probably also a really dark chocolate sorbet);

• Use soy sauce instead of salt or Miso when making anything with caramel - from caramel bonbons to caramel sauce, caramel shards to scatter over brownie batter or fold into cookie dough, butterscotch etc.;

• Be like Natasha Pickowivz and Toad Bakery and add soy sauce to your cookie dough instead of sea salt

• Use soy sauce to add a bit of complexity when making chocolate ganache - be it to top a cake with, to make truffles or to serve as a dessert.