What can be better than a tasty dessert pizza cooked on your home woodfired or gas fired pizza oven. Personally I always shied away from cooking dessert pizza. My time was always spent on creating the main course. But then one day I decided to try some dessert pizzas on the home Weber Genesis gas grill and KettlePizza Gas Pro setup. In the words of my kids Sam and Claire, "This pizza is amazing! You need to make it every single time you cook pizza dad!"
And the pizza that I made for dessert was so simple! It was just my regular home made 00 pizza dough with some cinnamon, sugar, apples and butter added. It was so easy and the family loved it! Now as I aim to raise my dessert pizza game I turned to Instagram and found some amazing recipes that I wanted to share. These are on my must try list and I expect to get similar kudos from my kids if I pull off the dessert pizza recipes correctly! I hope you enjoy them too!
Berry & Yogurt Fruit Pizza
Cream Cheese Peanut Butter Pizza
Nutella Dessert Pizza
Lemon Dessert Pizza
Belgian Chocolate Pizza
Dessert Pizza History
Do you think it was the Italians that decided to make pizza a dessert? Probably not! The modern idea of pizza certainly comes from Italy, and more specifically Naples. However, historical accounts from the Ancient Greeks and Romans describe a similar recipe, using leavened dough rolled out into a flat shape and baked, then topped with various ingredients. But what were those ingredients!
Well, there were no tomatoes in Europe until the 16th century, when they were brought back from the New World. That’s important for our dessert pizza story, because without the classic Neapolitan tomato sauce, ancient pizzas would have been topped with things we wouldn’t normally use today. Some of these toppings were sweet, using ingredients like honey, raisins, and pine nuts. These ancient dessert pizza recipes have been handed down through the generations and are still being used in parts of Italy today.
No matter the historical origins, the modern dessert pizza likely comes from many different chefs sharing the same brainwave. It’s not too much of a mental stretch to look at a pizza dough and wonder if you could load it up with sweet treats instead of tomato and cheese. Modern dessert pizzas often use a sweet base sauce. This could be chocolate, caramel, honey, or cream-based.
The crust can simply be a normal pizza dough, though without Italian herbs and other savoury flavourings. Alternatively, it can be made more like cookie dough, with sugar and eggs. Some chefs even base their dough recipes on chocolate brownie batter. Now that’s gourmet.
As for toppings, you can really let your imagination run wild. Fruits are still common, such as various berries or stone fruits. Confectionary is another classic, with candied almonds, Oreos, and chocolate giving dessert pizzas a super sweet kick. These ingredients can be balanced by nuts and sweet cheeses like mascarpone to ensure the pizza isn’t too much for even the most enthusiastic sweet tooth.
Having pizza for dessert can be a fun and exciting thing for families to do! It's easy to get started. Give it a shot!