How Celebrity Chefs Upgrade Old-School Desserts

irina2511/Shutterstock

From ambrosia salads at holiday potlucks to icebox cakes built with Grandma on hot summer days, there's something undeniably comforting about old-school desserts. Maybe it's the nostalgia. Maybe it's the sugar. But as much as we love tradition, even the sweetest legacies can use a little revamp. Enter the celebrity chefs, who aren't afraid to mess with Grandma's recipe cards — respectfully, of course.

In the sugar high that follows, we'll see big names putting bold spins on retro favorites. The Pioneer Woman gets creative with soda. Bobby Flay puts his own chocolatey spin on a classic dessert. Some chefs take pies from a solid to a liquid. The list goes on. As celebrity chefs upgrade old-school desserts with everything from coffee to Guinness to citrus zest, your grandmother might be clutching her pearls. But, soon enough, she'll be asking for seconds.

Catherine Murray/Shutterstock

Ambrosia has been masquerading as a salad since the 1800s. Inspired by the name used for the food of the gods in Greek mythology, this traditionally consisted of simply sliced oranges and pineapple layered with sugar and coconut. But, over time, another heavenly upgrade arrived in the form of marshmallows. The old-school dessert is also known as "5-cup salad" because a typical ambrosia recipe uses a cup each of five ingredients — mandarin oranges, pineapple, shredded coconut, sour cream, and those good ol' mini marshmallows. It's a Southern staple now, especially around the holidays.

But leave it to Emeril Lagasse to shout "bam!" at tradition. He gives ambrosia a grown-up makeover that skips the marshmallows entirely, and you won't even miss them (we promise). Instead, he brings in cream cheese for richness and brown sugar for a caramel-like sweetness. Lagasse also messes with the "5-cup salad" ratio. Instead, he blends ½ cup of softened cream cheese with ½ cup sour cream, 1 tablespoon and 2 teaspoons of light brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice in a large bowl. Then he stirs in some cherries with sliced oranges and grapefruit, 1 cup of toasted pecans, and a whopping 5 ½ cups of chopped pineapple (basically, just take down an entire pineapple). He places it all in a serving dish, tops it off with a cup of toasted coconut, and has enough for about eight servings. Here's hoping we can be part of that eight!

Elena Veselova/Shutterstock

Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, makes old-fashioned apple dumplings in under an hour. As proof that canned crescent rolls aren't just an appetizer afterthought, Drummond grabs 16 ounces of the stuff for her dessert recipe. She wraps Granny Smith apple wedges — two apples' worth — in triangles of the convenient dough, then lines them up in a buttered baking dish.

The dumpling sauce starts out traditionally old-school — a cup of melted butter heated with 1 ½ cups of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. She spoons that mixture over the wrapped apples in the pan, and then grabs her secret ingredient — a 12-ounce can of Mountain Dew. Yes, really. She pours the citrusy soda around the edges of the pan, tops it with a sprinkle of cinnamon, and bakes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 to 45 minutes. Once browned and slightly crispy on top, those warm dumplings are served with vanilla ice cream and a spoonful (or two) of that Mountain Dew-infused sauce.

Old-fashioned apple dumplings have been around for centuries upon centuries, certainly long before Mountain Dew fizzed into existence. But thanks to The Pioneer Woman, even apple dumplings now "Do the Dew" — and they do it deliciously.

Katheryn Moran/Shutterstock

In "International Dessert & Pastry Specialties," a 1913 compilation of recipes from world-famous chefs, Louis Thein laid out baked Alaska with zero fanfare. He limited the instructions to layering ladyfingers with ice cream and whipped egg whites, placing them in a hot oven, and serving. Some recipes of the time swapped out ladyfingers for sponge cake or recommended heating it all up with a fire shovel. We'll leave figuring out how to de-soot your baking tools to the historians. The bigger mystery here is, what flavor of ice cream were they using? Chef Thein, like so many others, never specified.

Chocolate lovers don't need a celebrity chef to fill in that missing detail. If you did want some professional guidance, Bobby Flay takes baked Alaska to a whole new (and much more chocolatey) level. He starts with a chocolate cake base, tops it with homemade chocolate almond brittle ice cream, and then even adds chocolate to the meringue.

His chocolate chip almond meringue starts off like a standard meringue recipe. But instead of vanilla bean paste, he combines equal parts vanilla and almond extract (½ teaspoon of each), plus an ounce of bittersweet chocolate shavings mixed in at the end. After piping (or piling) the meringue over the ice cream-topped cake, Flay goes for a controlled oven browning. But if you happen to still own a rustic fire shovel and a good pair of oven mitts, follow your bliss.

BooFamily/Shutterstock

Once upon a time, the icebox cake reigned supreme as the queen of no-bake desserts. Simple and nostalgic, it's a sweet stack of cookies (or sponge cake or ladyfingers) layered with whipped cream and left in the fridge to soften. When Nabisco put a recipe for the dessert on the packaging of its Famous Chocolate Wafers, a generation of kids grew up associating icebox cake with the black-and-white pattern created by the chocolate treats. But then Nabisco yanked those cookies from store shelves, leaving a classic icebox cake recipe without its staple ingredient.

Luckily, pastry chef Paola Velez has us covered with her go-to treat: Maria cookies. Velez compares these thin, round, and subtly sweet biscuits to graham crackers. So, if you like a graham cracker crust, you'll like what comes next.

Velez lines a pan with a layer of Maria cookies and fills in any gaps with coarse Maria cookie crumbs, fresh from the food processor. She slathers on whipped cream spiked with powdered sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Then comes layers of more cookies and more whipped cream. This stack of goodness chills in the fridge for at least six hours (or, even better, overnight), which gives the cookies the chance to soften into a cakey delight. Velez finishes the chilled cake off with another upgrade — dulce de leche spread on top. This is what happens when a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef takes on your grandmother's no-bake easy dessert.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Classic hummingbird cake isn't your average spice cake. Mashed bananas and crushed pineapple keep every bite ridiculously moist, while toasted pecans add a bit of crunch. Traditionally, it's stacked high and slathered in cream cheese frosting — delicious, yes, but also a bit of a balancing act. Kardea Brown, a Southern cook and host of "Delicious Miss Brown," gives this vintage favorite a modern makeover by transforming the unwieldy layers of cake into easy-to-serve (and even easier to eat) hummingbird cookie bars.

Let's get the bad news out of the way — the bars don't have cream cheese frosting. But, really, that's okay. Instead, the cream cheese goes right into the filling itself, along with the usual hummingbird cake ingredients, like pineapple and banana. That tropical filling lands on a spiced shortbread crust and gets topped with dried pineapple rings and sweetened coconut flakes. Once baked, cooled, and thoroughly chilled (yes, patience is required), the dessert is finished off with a sprinkling of chopped candied pecans. It's like cheesecake meeting hummingbird cake — a match made in dessert heaven that's way more stable than most relationships.

Alexander del Valle/Shutterstock

Bananas foster is the kind of dessert that makes a quiet night turn theatrical, flames and all. Created in the jazzy 1950s New Orleans restaurant scene, it contains bananas sautéed in butter and brown sugar, flambéed with rum, and served piping hot over vanilla ice cream. It's sweet, sticky, a little dramatic, and totally delicious.

But leave it to Guy Fieri, mayor of Flavortown, to take this classic into overdrive. His version starts with the usual ingredients — bananas, butter, brown sugar, and dark rum. He also adds banana liqueur, which isn't totally uncommon in a bananas foster recipe for extra tropical oomph. But then he also punches it up with coffee liqueur. After all, why settle for a two-booze dessert when you can turn it into a full-blown cocktail?

After a brief sauté, he ignites the sauce (the flames are, of course, still part of the fun) and stirs in orange juice and warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg. After the bananas are coated in the sauce, everything is poured over vanilla ice cream. The coffee liqueur mellows the sweetness with roasty notes, creating a coffee-spiked lava that's part dessert and part after-dinner drink.

Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

Tiramisu dazzled the New York restaurant scene as the hottest Italian dessert back in the mid-1980s. When and where the dessert actually originated is hotly debated (ask 10 Italians where it started and you'll most likely get 10 slightly different answers). Traditionally, tiramisu is built with coffee-soaked savoiardi (often substituted with ladyfingers in the U.S.), layered with mascarpone cream and finished with a dusting of cocoa powder.

Not long after the dessert's arrival in New York, hundreds of variations of tiramisu spread through the city. Substitutions were made, such as replacing mascarpone with whipped cream or cocoa for chocolate. Additions were plentiful, from nuts to a variety of spirits — espresso liqueur, amaretto, brandy, triple sec, and rum all schmoozed their way in.

Giada De Laurentiis rides on this 21-and-over approach while also adding a playful American twist with her peanut butter and jelly tiramisu. She layers the dessert in individual glasses or coffee mugs, starting with ladyfingers dipped in espresso. Then comes a mixture of creamy peanut butter folded into bourbon-laced mascarpone and lightened with whipped cream. This is topped with a spoonful of raspberry jam before she adds additional layers of ladyfingers and the peanut butter mixture. Finally, she finishes it off with a flourish of grated dark chocolate. It's allowed to chill in the fridge for at least four hours before serving. It's your childhood lunchbox treat all grown up.

Kaorinne/Getty Images

Your grandmother's apple crisp might look suspiciously like your cousin's apple crumble — or is it the other way around? Some purists draw the line between crisp and crumble based on the topping. Crumbles lean toward a streusel, while crisps toss in oats and maybe nuts to get that, well, crispiness when baked. But try telling that to the editors of the 1920 "Good Housekeeping's Book of Recipes and Household Discoveries." According to them, an apple crisp didn't need oats. Or nuts. Or much of anything, really. Similarly, when Betty Crocker debuted its "Picture Cook Book" in 1950, oats were still absent. It wasn't until 1956 that the latter was updated to incorporate oats into the recipe, marking the beginning of what many of us now recognize as classic old-fashioned apple crisp.

Betty Crocker's updated apple crisp is still a long way from Ina Garten's upgrade. The Barefoot Contessa zests things up, literally. She has a familiar base with McIntosh or Macoun apples, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. But she also mixes in the zest of both an orange and a lemon, along with two tablespoons each of their respective freshly squeezed juices. That citrusy apple base is topped with the well-mixed crumbles of flour, sugar, light brown sugar, kosher salt, butter, and, yes, oats! Grandma might lament the presence of lemon, but considering the fact that older generations didn't even necessarily use oats, we're all for innovation.

SATOSHI ONO/Shutterstock

Back in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, an ex-insurance agent decided premiums were overrated and pastries were the future. He created chiffon cake in his apartment — and Hollywood promptly lost its collective mind. Movie stars ordered it by the stack, and even Eleanor Roosevelt requested the secret recipe. Finally, in 1947, General Mills bought it for an undisclosed sum that remains one of baking history's best-kept secrets.

The next year, General Mills shared a recipe for "Betty Crocker Chiffon." The secret is a combo of vegetable oil and egg yolks in the batter, which is then gently folded with whipped egg whites. The result is light and airy, like angel food cake, yet somehow also rich. Orange was the original A-list flavor in the late '40s. But over the decades, we've seen everything from lemon to spice to classic vanilla chiffon served with Chantilly cream.

Michael Symon found a new way to play with flavor by taking chiffon cake out of the oven and straight to the grill. He heats it to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, pours the batter into a buttered bundt pan, and lets the cake bake over direct heat with the lid down. After about 45 minutes, you've got yourself a chiffon cake with a slight smoky flavor. That ex-insurance agent probably never imagined his apartment experiment would one day be adapted so creatively, but it's definitely one way to get fired up about dessert.

Food Arena/Shutterstock

Key lime pie is one of those beloved Southern classics that's been winning over taste buds for generations. It's already kind of perfect — tart and creamy with that signature graham cracker crust. So, how do you improve on a dessert that doesn't really need improving? If you're Trisha Yearwood, you don't mess with the pie. Instead, you reinvent it entirely as a milkshake.

While visions of cramming an entire pie into a blender are kinda fun, Yearwood takes a more refined (and more blender-friendly) approach. She starts with the presentation, giving the milkshake glasses a fancy graham cracker crusted rim. Think cocktail hour meets dessert nostalgia. To achieve the effect, crush honey graham crackers into a shallow dish. In a second dish, pour in sweetened condensed milk. Dip the rims of your glasses into the condensed milk, then into the graham crumbs until they're nicely coated. Pop those into the freezer while you make the milkshake.

The milkshake itself is blissfully simple. Blend 3 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk with ¼ cup of whole milk, ¼ cup of key lime juice, and 2 cups of vanilla ice cream. Hit high speed and let it whirl for about a minute until well blended. Grab those chilled glasses from the freezer, fill them up, and top with whipped cream. Just like that, you've got yourself a sippable slice of key lime pie.

Linas T/Shutterstock

In 1904, The New York Times declared grasshopper pie to be "the most wonderful dish." They were, however, referring to a dish made of actual dried grasshoppers that supposedly tasted like sweet ginger biscuits (we'll take their word for it). If that's such a wonderful dish, imagine ditching the grasshoppers and replacing them with melted marshmallows, whipped cream, crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and a chocolate cookie crumb crust. That version of grasshopper pie gained popularity around midcentury. The pie's name salutes the grasshopper cocktail, an after-dinner drink with a mint flavor and a hopping-insect green hue.

Among the many upgrades to grasshopper pie was the ice cream pie version, made by spreading mint chocolate chip ice cream over a chocolate crumb crust (plus chopped Oreo cookies and chocolate-covered peppermint candies). But leave it to Martha Stewart to take it to the next level. Instead of a simple crust, she bakes a chocolate dome cake, hollows it out, and packs it with mint chocolate chip ice cream. It all goes in the freezer to firm up. Before serving, she coats it with a chocolate glaze. The result is a shiny chocolate dome hiding a cool, minty core. It looks a bit like a dwarf planet and, fittingly, tastes out of this world.

MShev/Shutterstock

Calling this cake old-fashioned might be a bit of an understatement. Versions of ginger-spiced food appeared well before the early 15^th century, when one cookbook told readers to boil breadcrumbs in honey with ginger and other spices to make the sweet treat.

Nigella Lawson takes spices to a whole new level, giving old-fashioned gingerbread cake a grown-up twist. She mixes in stout, such as Guinness. In a recipe that makes 24 small squares, you'll need to use an entire cup of stout. The dessert also has a cup of golden syrup and over a cup of dark brown sugar, so any buzz is more likely coming from sugar than alcohol.

In addition to stout, Lawson also blends in over a cup of sour cream. Together, the sour cream's tang and the beer's bittersweet edge help balance all the syrupy sugar and spice. So, Guinness-infused gingerbread won't taste boozy, but it will give your taste buds something to "stout" about.