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My wife and I have a sweet tooth but we are trying to eat more healthy this year. Can you recommend a few tasty but very healthy deserts that are beginner level to make?

New Year's Jumpstart

Fran Costigan - New Year's Jumpstart

Recorded

This event was on January 6, 2026

Start 2026 on a sweet note. Join Chef Fran Costigan, Rouxbe Director of Vegan Pastry for a January deep-dive into the essential building blocks of vegan desserts. She’ll explore the flavors, functions, and best uses of different flours, sweeteners, cocoa, and chocolate and more, so you can bake smarter and tastier ight from the first whisk of the New Year!. Perfect for beginners and seasoned bakers alike, this session will reset your confidence, refresh your skills, and inspire delicious desserts all year long.

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Question

Robert Kerr

My wife and I have a sweet tooth but we are trying to eat more healthy this year. Can you recommend a few tasty but very healthy deserts that are beginner level to make?

Answer

I think baked apples stuffed with dried fruit and nuts is a wonderful sweet treat. Something that I enjoy very much and it's certainly is what we would say is on the healthy spectrum. Poached pears and agar fruit soup and some, and those are all super simple to make right. You you just core an apple, take a little bit of the skin off around the front, the top and then stuff, a bunch of your favorite dried fruits and nuts in there. A little bit of maple syrup maybe, maybe. And just bake them until they're nice and soft and you can poach pears in a nice syrup or some juice, uh, and have a lovely dessert and fill out the plate with more. Now I like to have a small cookie or a, you know, a small chocolate truffle for example. Chef Char still teases me about the very first time that we met, which was quite a long time ago. And I brought some truffles to give to her and she said, what are those? They're so little. So here's the thing Robert and everyone else who's interested in this is you can have a piece of chocolate, you can have a small piece of cake that's made healthfully, but small is the word.

Fran Costigan

Director of Vegan Pastry

FranCostigan.com

Fran Costigan is internationally renowned as the authority on vegan desserts. Trained at the New York Restaurant School and Natural Gourmet Institute, Fran was a chef in both traditional and vegan pastry kitchens before moving into teaching over 20 years ago. A lifelong chocoholic and long time vegan, Fran’s latest book, Vegan Chocolate: Unapologetically Luscious and Decadent Dairy Free Desserts, (Running Press 2013) is for all who madly, deeply love chocolate desserts, whether or not dietary considerations are an issue. Her previous cookbook, More Great Good Dairy-Free Desserts Naturally (Book Publishing Company 2006) is the basis of the Costigan Vegan Baking Boot Camp Intensive®. For more information, www.francostigan.com.