Healthy Italian Dessert Recipes

These panna cottas (Italian for cooked cream) are smooth, light and mild molded desserts set off by a bright, intensely flavored cherry compote. The recipe calls for a vanilla bean, which yields the best flavor, but you can use extra vanilla extract instead; just be sure it's top quality. The compote is also delicious spooned over slices of angel food cake or scoops of vanilla frozen yogurt. Recipe by Nancy Baggett for EatingWell.

Panna cotta (“cooked cream” in Italian) is a silky-smooth dessert that works beautifully with the flavor of coffee. The sauce was inspired by café brûlot, the New Orleans classic coffee drink spiked with flamed brandy. Cooking for teetotalers? Use brandy extract in the panna ­cottas and omit brandy (and flambéing) from the sauce. Garnish with chocolate-covered espresso beans, if desired. Recipe by Joyce Hendley for EatingWell.

Dunk these fruitcake-inspired whole-grain biscotti in a cup of hot tea or coffee.

In this take on tiramisù, the Italian Christmas bread pandoro is used instead of ladyfingers to make this praiseworthy dessert. If you prefer ladyfingers, use 8 ounces in place of the pandoro.

The neat rows of shiny strawberries bring to mind the local strawberry patch. When making this cake, keep in mind that the yogurt used in the filling needs to drain for 4 hours ahead of time.

Buttermilk and half-and-half replace cream in this lighter Italian panna cotta recipe. If you like, garnish with curls of candied orange peel.

Granita, a sweet Italian ice, is characterized by its grainy texture. Lemon Zinger tea, which gets its distinctive flavor from hibiscus flowers, gives this one an exquisite garnet hue and refreshing taste.

Studded with chocolate and nuts, these crisp cookies are sure to entice bake sale patrons. Help buyers gauge how to fit this treat into a diabetes-friendly meal plan by labeling each pack with the calorie and carb count per cookie.

Light whipped topping is the secret to this delicious mousse dessert. Portions of the whipped topping are sweetened and flavored with cocoa powder and strawberries and then layered and frozen to resemble Neapolitan-style ice cream.

Nothing looks more handsome than a bowl of jewel-bright fruits: glistening red berries, burnished plums, blueberries with their dusky bloom. This combination is exceptionally tasty, particularly when the plums have an edge of tartness. Sweeter fruits can be substituted; chunks of nectarines, cherries and gooseberries go together delightfully, as do cantaloupe, blackberries and kiwis.

Crisp with nuts and whole wheat, these cookies are made to dunk in strong coffee.

This is a traditional Sicilian dessert for the hot weather. It starts with an icy espresso granita (“little grains” in Italian). The crystals are scraped up with a fork and served with a dollop of whipped cream.

Who says vanilla has to be boring? This light and airy panna cotta dessert has luscious flavor in every spoonful.

Baked pears are a luscious dessert, particularly when they're baked with Marsala and Italian amaretti cookies.

A simple way to make this Italian classic frozen dessert.

Drizzled with white white chocolate, these twice-baked cookies are an Italian-inspired classic.

Buttermilk gives this silky panna cotta, or “cooked cream,” a bright, fresh taste. A tart-sweet strawberry sauce is a nice contrast.

A bit of cinnamon, lemon and vanilla flavor these cannoli shells. To make pizzelle cookies, do not roll them after baking; simply transfer pizzelles to a wire rack to cool.

A very thin slice of this dark fig and nut cake, redolent of orange zest, cinnamon and nutmeg, is all you need at the end of a meal.

Figs and chocolate fill these little cookies.

For this celebratory tart recipe, a smooth, creamy, lemon-scented Greek yogurt filling, adorned with a ring of dried figs, is layered on a bed of honey-sweetened polenta. Real, Italian-style polenta is made from medium- or coarse-ground whole-grain cornmeal. Products labeled polenta, medium-ground cornmeal and corn grits (not instant) can be used interchangeably in this recipe

Biscotti are always sweetly welcome dippers for coffee or tea, but you can see how well they accompany cold favorites when you serve them with sorbet.

This Italian-inspired dessert is velvety in texture. Milk powder added to the mix inhibits the formation of ice crystals.

Apricot puree flavors this healthy mousse; crumbled amaretti cookies are a nice textural contrast.